Xania Monet is an R&B singer with Billboard chart entries, a debut album on a real label, and a reported multimillion-dollar deal behind her. She is also generated — the voice, the face, all of it. The songs start with Telisha "Nikki" Jones, a poet from Mississippi who writes every lyric herself and has been doing it since she was 24.
The run happened fast. In September 2025, "How Was I Supposed to Know" hit No. 1 on Billboard's R&B Digital Song Sales chart, with the catalog pulling around 9.8 million U.S. on-demand streams. Then in November the same song debuted at No. 30 on Adult R&B Airplay — Billboard called it "the first known instance of an AI-based act to earn a spot on a Billboard radio chart," with 15 of the panel's 57 stations playing it. In between, Hallwood Media — run by former Interscope executive Neil Jacobson — signed her after a bidding war Billboard reported reached $3 million.
The poems come first
Jones revealed herself as the person behind Xania Monet in a CBS Mornings interview with Gayle King in November 2025, and she walked through the process plainly. "I scroll through my list of poems to see which one I want to turn into a song. Then I put the lyrics into an A.I. music generator, add prompts like 'slow tempo R&B,' 'female soulful vocals,' 'light guitar,' and 'heavy drums,' and then I just click create."
The generator is Suno. The poems are hers — a collection she's been building for years, most of it autobiographical. "Whether it was stuff I went through, a close family member, or a close friend, I wrote about it," she told CBS. "How Was I Supposed to Know" came out of losing her father when she was eight. Her manager, Romel Murphy, told Billboard that 90% of the lyrics are her own true stories.
That division of labor is written into the paperwork, too: Billboard reported Jones retains full songwriting and production credits on the album.
Building a singer who isn't there
Jones is 31, runs a design studio out of Olive Branch, Mississippi, and according to MS NOW's reporting taught herself the toolchain — CapCut and fal.ai for the visual persona, Suno for the music — roughly four months before the song broke. She's not a singer, and she's never pretended the voice is hers. What she pushes back on is the idea that the persona makes it fake.
"Xania is an extension of me, so I look at her as a real person," she told CBS. And on the technology itself: "I just feel like AI… it's the new era that we're in. And I look at it as a tool, as an instrument, and utilize it."
The pushback
Not everyone was fine with it. Kehlani, in a since-deleted TikTok reported by Forbes, said nothing could justify AI to her, pointing at models trained on uncredited copyrighted work. The major labels mostly sat out the bidding war for the same reason — the copyright suits against Suno are still pending.
Jones didn't swing back. "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion," she said on CBS. "Technology is evolving. Everybody has different ways of putting in the work to get to where they're at. I don't feel a way about it. I still love Kehlani's music. I still listen to her music every day."
Where it stands
The Hallwood debut, "The Things I Didn't Say," landed January 9, 2026 — 21 tracks, all of them starting the same way everything else in the catalog started: a poem in Jones's collection, picked out, pasted in, and prompted into a song. The notebook is still doing the writing.