so first, I'm obviously not Part of the Culture -- I have enjoyed a lot of disparate rap and hip-hop artists over the years, but I'm not the most knowledgeable about the fullness of its history, in part because my whiteness ELO has been hovering just under International Grandmaster since I was 16. that being said, I have noticed a few things that haven't received quite as much discussion as they maybe should, specifically the weird role AI has played in how the Drake-Kendrick feud escalated over the past few weeks, and I thought I would offer some very basic analysis. semi-long read under the cut!
let's start with "One Shot," a track by 23-year-old Sy The Rapper, who used the AI1 generator Jammable to drop a fake Kendrick diss against Drake on April 15. in an interview with Complex Sy said he thought people would immediately recognize that it was AI, but ended up having to make a public statement clarifying he had made it after all. Gross, but whatever, yeah?
on the same day Sy's interview was published, Drake dropped "Taylor Made Freestyle." the track was less than four minutes, and more than two of them were, infamously, AI-generated verses by Tupac and Snoop Dogg. This time the AI was obvious, because Pac is dead and Snoop....to be honest, that voice only kind of sounded like Snoop to me. it got most of the pitch/timbre of his voice, but didn't capture the quirks of Snoop's cadence and delivery, which is what set him apart in the first place. Anyway, Drake rapped roughly 40% of his own song (calling the AI Snoop "unc," continuing to not beat the cornball allegations) and promptly removed the track from his platforms after getting a C&D from Pac's estate a few days later.
but the biggest wrinkle came this past weekend when Metro Boomin dropped his "BBL Drizzy" beat and challenged the entire Internet to write their hardest bars for it. and let's be frank: the beat is a bop, and the vocal refrain is an earworm. I can't get it out of my head! BUT THEN. On Twitter, Metro admitted he didn't realize who created the vocals at first, told people to show love to the person behind it, and thanked him for his "contribution to history": a comedian who goes by King Willonious.
King Willonious is, by all evidence, an AI bro down to the bone. his social media accounts are jam packed with AI-generated music, mostly based on (from what I can tell) the Motown sound and 1960s-70s soul in general rather than any specific artists. his IG bio describes him as an "AI storyteller," and he uses AI to generate "album art" for the music too. to his credit, Willonious has previously been involved with making a couple short films and a webseries called Black Twitter Inc., all of which I would like to believe is very funny and not written by ChatGPT.2
I'm not really sure how Metro managed to hear this track without realizing who made it or how, but regardless, "BBL Drizzy" is now an international viral sensation. in a sense, it's at least transformative: even though the vocals were artificially generated, Metro himself appears to have made that beat, and chopped up the sample in such a way that it is no longer purely an AI creation. on the other hand, AI has significantly influenced the direction of this cultural moment yet again, in such a way that it is no longer legible as such to much of the listening public -- even some of those who are closely following the production and lyrical content of Dot and Drake's disses.3
why does this matter? in my opinion, Drake's use of AI to impersonate Snoop and Pac is not tangibly different from Willonious using it to make computer-generated "music." Metro's use of that sample only differs in that he (somehow) was unaware he was sampling an AI track; it still represents a real source of harm. not only is it incredibly disturbing that many people can no longer tell the difference between human-made music and AI, i find it horrifying that some have embraced Willonious' schtick after finding out what he really does. one IG commenter wrote on a different post "this may be the only reason i love AI," and that sentence honestly broke my heart.
please, friends, remember that as AI tools become more popular, they are wreaking havoc on our environment. from a Yale School of the Environment article in February (emphasis added):
Working from calculations of annual use of water for cooling systems by Microsoft, [associate professor of electrical and computer engineering Shaolei] Ren estimates that a person who engages in a session of questions and answers with GPT-3 (roughly 10 to 50 responses) drives the consumption of a half-liter of fresh water.
[....]
[I]n The Dalles, Oregon, where Google runs three data centers and plans two more, the city government filed a lawsuit in 2022 to keep Google’s water use a secret from farmers, environmentalists, and Native American tribes who were concerned about its effects on agriculture and on the region’s animals and plants. The city withdrew its suit early last year. The records it then made public showed that Google’s three extant data centers use more than a quarter of the city’s water supply. And in Chile and Uruguay, protests have erupted over planned Google data centers that would tap into the same reservoirs that supply drinking water.
AI critics often focus on the ethical problems with LLMs and what that means for art, arguing that these are effectively plagiarism robots. that is true, and is in fact something that's very consequential in this beef, rooted as it is in a discussion of personal and cultural ethics. but I feel like I've hardly seen anyone talk about how materially concerning it is that AI is playing a bigger and bigger role in music,4 and how that might further increase the environmental harms the tech is already accelerating. stadium tours are already a huge part of our carbon use as a species; can we please not add fucking MidJourney compost to the mix??
anyway, that's about the only thing I feel qualified to say on this topic.5 I hope the biggest lesson people take away from "BBL Drizzy" is that you really should be careful when you tell Metro to "make some drums," but I fear that more people will end up thinking "this AI thing can't be all bad -- it helped us clown on that predator Drake!" and that kinda just sucks.
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I'm using the term "AI" here for clarity and accessibility. I prefer not to call this tech "artificial intelligence" because that term already meant something (machine sentience) before this fuckery really kicked off. but everyone insists on using AI as an umbrella term for generative tech, so here we are.
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this is why, if you are an artist who makes actual art with other human beings, you should not hop into making AI slop: it immediately calls into question the origins of everything else you've done since AI tools became available.
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admittedly, I do find it amusingly ironic that on the same day Drake dropped "Taylor Made," he also released "Push Ups," the track where he told Metro to "shut up and make some drums"...who then did so, using AI against Drake like Drake tried to do to Kendrick, only with significantly more positive results.
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yes, I am a Drake hater, but it was also very bad when someone used AI to make a fake Drake/Weeknd track last year!
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with one final exception: Megan thee Stallion was right about these rap dudes all along, stream Hiss
