Originally published: https://pungmedia.com/en/kurdish-but-how-ai-song-lyrics-and-self-colonisation/

03 May 2026 | Dilsah Kaymaz, Pung Media

Kurdish language and art have been the strongest carriers of an existential resistance and the struggle to preserve collective memory for over a century. In the historical span stretching from the Dengbêj tradition to modern Kurdish music, every word and every melody has served as a political, social, and cultural sanctuary. In this respect, works created in Kurdish have shouldered the responsibility of passing a people’s language and culture down to the future, going far beyond mere artistic concerns. However, today, aside from external assimilation policies and historical pressures, we are faced with an internal danger brought on by digitalization, a brand-new breaking point: the invasion of the artistic field by “literary” content devoid of depth and context, produced through the uncontrolled and unconscious use of artificial intelligence.

Recently, particularly within the Kurdish music industry, we are increasingly witnessing artificial intelligence characters and Kurdish songs, which are also written by AI, being sung by these characters. On the other hand, there are also claims and debates that lyrics generated by AI tools are being released into the market by artists as if they were their own original creations. Musicians who cannot speak Kurdish in their daily lives have begun writing entire albums’ worth of Kurdish lyrics. Taking advantage of technological possibilities, enriching music with new digital instruments, or utilizing modern technologies in backing tracks can be understood as a necessity of the modern age. However, when it comes to the “lyrics”, that is, the meaning, the soul, and the philosophy, we are confronted with piles of meaningless sentences made up of Kurdish words, but completely disconnected from the historical spirit, geography, and artistic heritage of the Kurdish language. This situation also brings about a structural transformation that undermines the language’s process of liberation and diversification, draining it of its substance.

To understand the background of this transformation, it is first necessary to examine the mathematical relationship that artificial intelligence establishes with language. Today, since large language models are fed with massive data pools in dominant languages like English, they can produce relatively successful outputs that can be considered literary. However, Kurdish (especially Kurmanji and Zazaki) falls into the category of languages that have not been adequately “fed” in the digital world, meaning their datasets remain limited. When artificial intelligence produces a Kurdish text, it assembles the language only at a superficial grammatical level. It cannot grasp the historical experience behind the words, the metaphors, the idioms, and most importantly, the social context. In his 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator”, Walter Benjamin speaks of the “original aura” and spiritual depth in a language’s literary production. According to Benjamin, language is not merely a mechanical tool for communication, but a living organism that harbors historical experience within it. What is missing in the Kurdish lyrics produced by artificial intelligence is exactly this “aura”. While the algorithm places words side by side, it mostly constructs the syntax of Kurdish using the logic of dominant languages. As a result, the emerging works are soulless and meaningless texts whose words are Kurdish but whose way of thinking, logic, and emotion belong to other languages. This situation creates a direct threat of erosion to the artistic heritage and wordcraft of Kurdish literature and music, which have been distilled over centuries.

  The fact that these low-quality texts produced by artificial intelligence find an audience and are recklessly used by artists relies on the exploitation of a social reflex. Long years of language bans, oppression, and cultural restrictions naturally created an instinct of unconditional ownership and protection in Kurdish society toward everything produced in Kurdish. However, this understandable emotional protectionism turns into a structural trap when it completely eliminates the critical filter. The mindset of “no matter what, as long as it is Kurdish” sets a dangerous stage where quality in art is no longer sought, and mere linguistic labels are deemed sufficient. This situation gains a clearer meaning when examined within the framework of postcolonial theory. In his work “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952), Frantz Fanon explains how the colonized or oppressed individual unknowingly internalizes the tools of the dominant culture and its superficial, consumption-oriented relationship with language.In Kurdish artistic production, approving every product placed before us simply because “it is Kurdish”, without regard for meaning, depth, or artistic quality, gives rise to a state of self-colonization. In the name of competing with the fast consumption industry and low-quality mass production of dominant cultures, we end up lowering the intellectual level of our own language with our very own hands. As Kurdish becomes merely a rapidly consumed “digital object”, we unwittingly rationalize to ourselves the historically imposed perception of the language as “undeveloped, lacking depth, and confined merely to folklore”. Disabling our critical reasoning means accepting the narrow boundaries the dominant system has set for our language, but this time with our own consent.

 The development of a language and culture is undoubtedly possible through its diversification in terms of content, style, and theme. The meeting of modern Kurdish music with rap, pop, rock, experimental, or electronic styles is highly important in terms of expanding the boundaries of the language. However, this diversity must be achieved not by taking refuge in the ready, mechanical, and soulless algorithmic templates of artificial intelligence, but with an artistic struggle, by pushing the internal possibilities of the language itself, and with a literary concern. If we do not collectively defend a certain standard, digital platforms will soon be dragged into a meaningless content dump consisting of “piles of Kurdish words”. This uncontrolled increase in quantity not only fails to produce any aesthetic value, but it will also cause the voices of “real” artists, who produce works of true quality and have dedicated their lives to the development of the language, art, and music, to be drowned out in this “noise”. As the listener becomes accustomed to the mechanical repetitions produced by artificial intelligence, they will stop demanding the true literary power, the hidden rich vocabulary, and the philosophy of the language. This will ultimately result in the intellectual barrenness of Kurdish production.

 To summarize, this criticism should not be read as hostility toward technological advancements or as conservative traditionalism in art. On the contrary, this stance is a necessity of the deep respect and responsibility felt for the Kurdish language, its historical heritage, and its artistic future. We cannot turn a blind eye to a language that has historically paid heavy prices and shown tremendous resistance to preserve its existence, being sacrificed today to the cheap convenience and consumption frenzy brought about by the digital age. We do not have the luxury to say, “As long as it is Kurdish, it does not matter how it is”. Quite the opposite, we must defend that this language has the potential to stand side by side with the most literary and high quality works of art in the world, and we must maintain this standard. What will carry Kurdish music and literature into the future is not the emotionless algorithms of artificial intelligence. It is the genuine sincerity distilled from the human heart, consciousness, and historical experience. Artists must seek their own original words by drawing nourishment from the rich oral tradition of this language, from Arjen Arî, Cegerxwîn, and Melayê Cizîrî.