The senator who helped push a bill to stop unauthorized digital copies of people’s voices and faces is now defending a video that dropped her into Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show. When pressed about it on Friday, Marsha Blackburn offered a new explanation but no apology.
FOX13 reporter Rob Sneed caught up with the Tennessee Republican after a public safety roundtable in Shelby County.
He asked her directly about Black Americans who found the clip offensive. He also asked if she understood the song’s lyrics and the reaction to the video.
“We, there would never be any action that was intended to offend,” Blackburn said. She again credited a county commissioner with making the video and said her campaign shared it because she thought it was fun.
The clip went up October 13 to promote early voting in her run for governor. The AI scene swapped Blackburn in for Lamar and turned fellow Tennessee Republicans into dancers while “Not Like Us” played.
That song is Lamar’s 2024 diss track aimed at Drake. It went on to win Record and Song of the Year at the 2025 Grammys. He performed it during his Super Bowl LIX halftime show in New Orleans that February, which makes it a strange pick for a cheerful get out the vote post.
Blackburn had already brushed the post off as a “funsie” before Sneed’s question about offended viewers. Her Democratic opponent, Jerri Green, had criticized the use of AI in the campaign even earlier.
The awkward part for Blackburn is her track record in Washington. In June, she and Democratic Senator Chris Coons announced that their NO FAKES proposal had cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Her office described it as offering safeguards for people’s voices and visual likenesses, with exceptions for protected speech.
She has also gone after AI content aimed at her own campaign. In July, she demanded that the American Exceptionalism Institute PAC take down an AI attack ad within 48 hours and disclose its use of the technology, WPLN reported.
That ad accused her of taking drug industry money in exchange for legislation. Her letter denied she ever accepted a bribe to pass a bill, and her spokesperson told WPLN that two TV stations had pulled the spot.
The two cases aren’t identical. One used AI to make an allegation against Blackburn, while her own post recast a music performance as a voting pitch.
Her defenders could lean on that distinction, though the people asking about the Lamar clip were raising a different question about the song, the performance and who it was made for.
No response from Lamar appears in the reporting so far. Blackburn’s campaign keeps pointing to affordability, public safety, education, health care and infrastructure as its priorities, but with early voting under way, the questions about that clip keep following her from event to event.
