The Rift Between Amaarae and Gabriel Moses Highlights The Pervasive Irreverence for IP among Creatives

In the creative world, where ideas function both as a thrust and social currency, there are very few topics as relevant, enduring, and contentious as intellectual property theft. In these fraught times we live in, where A.I. models ceaselessly prowl the internet, scrapping data and, more importantly, intellectual property, seemingly with rollicking abandon, the topic has taken on a renewed importance as artists, simmering in existential dread, grapple with the imminence of a world where ideas no longer have their characteristic hallowed status. 

Months ago, OpenAI—the AI giant whose popular products include ChatGPT and a text-to-video model named Sora—introduced GPT-4o, whose image generation capabilities were promoted as the newest AI frontier. The model’s capabilities extend from routine image upscaling to generating specific images from prompts. However, when it hit the internet, it found a rather uncanny use case: excited netizens quickly figured that the model excels at rendering illustrations in the style of popular studios, and before long everyone had begun regaling themselves with illustrated versions of their selfies, group photos, anything they could find. While most people tried their hands at several illustration styles—Disney, Dreamworks, MGM-—the animation style of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli quickly emerged as the overwhelming favorite. I suspect the nostalgic feel of Studio Ghibli’s animations, given Gen Z’s well-documented penchant for nostalgia, has something to do with this. 

Nonetheless, even as the internet delighted in a deluge of “ghiblified” photos, more conscientious netizens anxiously mulled over the situation’s implications. Miyazaki, whose jaunty illustration style belies his penchant for plumbing difficult philosophical quandaries, had himself become mired in a philosophical dilemma. He has, in the past, spoken critically about AI art and argued that at best it’s a hollow simulacrum of human creativity and yet, his illustration style has been subsumed and hollowed out by machines and is now being used to churn out sloppy renditions of a style he honed for decades.

As artists continue to parry AI, while anxiously pondering over how AI’s ascendancy might shape intellectual property laws in the coming years, they still have to contend with humans who are still very much in the business of intellectual property infractions. The latest iteration of this millennia old conversation appears to be the simmering rift between Amaarae—whose Black Star album is set for release on the 8th of August, 2025—and Gabriel Moses, a photography virtuoso whose signature blue-tinted, underexposed photography style has been tapped by everyone, from Wizkid—for the alternative cover and promotional material for his Morayo album—to brands like Nike, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Dazed Magazine.

Days ago, IcyestTwat, who is handling the creative direction for Amaarae’s imminent album Black Star, posted, on X, the album cover alongside a picture of the Ghanaian flag. The album cover is a facsimile of the flag, the only notable difference being that, in the cover, the star—which occupies a central position in the Ghanaian flag,—is Amaarae, who looks to be slicked in a dark coat of crude oil, or a similar substance. The symbolism in the image is hardly revolutionary but exceedingly potent, functioning as a visual hagiography of sorts for the artist. Hours after the post, Gabriel Moses, by way of a quote-tweet, responded, posting a photograph of his which bears an uncanny resemblance to Amaarae’s album cover, and a caption that reads: “How many times will they copy my ting before I tell my mum.” 

The tweet immediately fomented a deluge of competing opinions. Amaarae’s cover, very clearly, shares similarities with Moses’ photograph—which was released publicly in November of 2024. However, at its core, the idea of replacing the star in the Ghanaian flag with one’s muse is hardly revolutionary. It’s not far-fetched to assume, or create allowances for the possibility that they both independently arrived at the concept. 

But even if Amaarae’s cover directly references—to invoke a phrase that has almost become anthemic in today’s creative world—Gabriel Moses’ photograph, is that enough reason for rousing social media drama given that referencing or recreating things we love has become one of the leading traditions of our time? Athletes routinely recreate celebrations and poses from the past; remakes of popular movies have become commonplace; sampling, in music, is at an all-time high; and worst of all, nobody seems to be able to piece together an outfit without scrolling mindlessly on Pinterest. Fans of Amaarae and general skeptics seized on these facts in response to Moses’ tweet, arguing that his case lacked grounding. “These typa things have existed before you picked up your camera,” one tweet reads.

Moses’ next few tweets would, however, send the conversation in a different direction. Gabriel Moses, an excerpt from an email reveals, was the first choice for the album’s photography. In another message, which Moses posted, someone who purportedly worked at the shoot claimed to have “received the deck for this Amaarae thing,” and that “your work (Moses’) was all over it.” Taken together, these messages suggest that the process of recruiting Moses’ had fallen through and they instead elected to recreate one of his works. 

What makes this conversation more interesting is that while it can be argued that Amaarae’s team, in their handling of the situation, were circuitous, underhanded even, nothing about what they did is illegal; while copyright laws protect a photograph from unauthorized reproduction, distribution or display, the underlying idea is not protected. And so, situations like this lie in moral grey areas; depending on how one goes about it, referencing can either be interpreted as flattery or plagiarism, and the deciding factor typically comes down to giving credit. 

There’s something particularly disturbing about being inspired by someone’s work and passing it off as an original idea. This was the issue of contention between Mowalola, who oversaw the creative direction of Rema’s Heis, and Maison 2500 in their rift last year. Maison 2500 held that Mowalola had plagiarized his logo in the creation of the typography for Rema’s album cover. The similarities between both designs, which warp text in the silhouette of a bat, are striking; regardless, ideas are not protected by copyright law and so, the scuffle online, for all the attention it garnered, lacked legal grounding. A more brazen example of this trend is the case of Stephiano (@walahisteph on X), who earlier this year, took Asake and Magic Sticks to task for recreating Organize without crediting him for his input on the early version of the song. 

Taken together, these examples paint a grim-but-hardly-surprising portrait, given that they exemplify the ironic irreverence for ideas that pervade the creative industry. One would think that the creative industry, which runs on ideas, would be more tactful when borrowing or referencing ideas and concepts. In reality, however, many creatives exploit loopholes in the law and cloak their underhanded tactics with euphemisms like referencing. There’s a proper way to reference someone’s work and it involves being loud when giving credit. 

In the fraught times we live in, where tech overlords routinely flout trademark and copyright laws to furnish A.I models with our collective intellectual property, creatives owe it to themselves to act in good faith as regards intellectual property ethics. After all, if we can’t act right and hold ourselves accountable when we err, what moral grounds do we have to rail against insentient machines and the impudent digital oligarchs who are setting a dangerous precedent in our understanding of human creativity.