On AI in Hip-Hop

Last year, Kasher Quon dropped a music video that uses the Detroit scam rapper’s ridiculously vivid and sometimes offensive punchlines as prompts for a batshit AI cartoon. In “Transported,” a dude with a small afro has a shaking fit at a liquor store counter as a group of Asian caricatures watch him in confusion (“Yo’ bum ass mad the liquor store just ran out of beer”) and a balding Italian man yells at his pizza boy for flashing money into his phone camera on the job (“Shouldn’t be posting banks on the ’Gram if you work at Happy’s, he at a pizza place”).

Then, to get darker, a mustached cartel leader is detained by ICE agents (“My plug ain’t supposed to be here, his ass got deported”) and a man overdoses on fentanyl in the recording booth (“My opp just bought a percocet, I hope that bitch fent”). In less than two minutes, there’s about a dozen other scenes just like these, including a bunch that feature Kasher’s AI avatar doing stuff he could easily do without AI: Count money, fill a styrofoam cup with lean, eat dinner at a steakhouse.

“Transported” is by far one of the stupidest rap videos I’ve seen in a minute, but it’s been on my mind in a why does this exist way ever since. It doesn’t feel like AI just for the sake of AI, instead part of an absurd artistic vision that makes sense coming from the edgy, no-budget world of Detroit scam rap. In that vision, he’s sort of like the last man on Earth meets Robin Hood, spending his days coming up with schemes in the aisles of nearly empty department stores, outside of closed banks, and inside of Airbnbs and hotels that seem to have no other guests. These videos can seem so desolate and quiet that they already feel unnatural, the AI only amplifies that effect.

To see more, I dove into the catalog of director Klipp Ai, where all of the videos were in the same style—AI versions of random rappers from random cities flexing money and shooting guns and dancing with girls and going to the club—but none of them were nearly as twisted, just an automated formula. (I had no idea if Klipp Ai was even a real person until we had a cryptic DM exchange: “I wanna remain faceless but we have meet [sic]on another occasion,” they told me.)

Up until I watched “Transported,” AI in any element of rap visuals—videos, cover art, show flyers, etc.—was an uncomplicated issue for me: It was undeniably bad, probably evil. But the moment I found merit in one video, the holes in my moral stance were exposed. Questions I never thought to ask myself began to rattle around my head: Is there ever an excuse for AI art? Are all uses of AI equal? Am I more concerned with AI art itself or being morally implicated in a technological shift I didn’t ask for?

James, an active blogger and musician under the moniker friends& who also works full-time as a color grader on music videos, remembers his own moral wrestling match with AI. “Years ago, I was excited by the jankiness of the AI video of Will Smith eating spaghetti; it was super fucked he couldn’t even swallow it because the AI hadn’t figured out how to do that yet,” he says. “Now three years later, I’m like, I wish this technology didn’t exist. It’s a lot stranger when the point of AI is for you to not even realize it’s there.”

Earlier this year, for his 112-track genre-mashing compilation folx, which features at one point an AI-generated Jeff Mangum, he created an AI music video, which he eventually scrapped for one without it. “I’m proud of the one without AI, but it was so much harder,” he says. “We spent so much money and had to call in so many favors from friends, but it was cool to be able to share that moment with them; AI is super fucking anti-social.”

Currently in rap, AI music videos are inescapable. Once you notice one, there’s no going back. There are the obvious offenders: 1900Rugrat’s “Plane Jane,” where he hangs out with tatted up, durag-wearing versions of the babies from Nickelodeon’s Rugrats, and Peewee Longway’s “Wat We On” that features his classic blue M&M man living like he’s in a Jason Statham movie.

More often, the technology is in brief visual effects, such as Michael Bay-style camera whip-pans and crash zooms or those colorful animations that are everywhere: the bulging anime eyes of TisaKorean’s “2 + 2 = 4 (Equations),” the floating decapitated head of Pradabagshawty’s “I’m Scared,” the lean-slathered waffles of Bally Baby’s “Pourin Pain.”

There’s a decent chance, too, that AI is there even when you can’t see it. “A lot of labels have started to tell us they don’t want to see AI in the videos,” says JayJay Thakar, aka Moshpxt, who has been a go-to videographer in the underground rap circuit for nearly a decade, having worked with the likes of Yeat, MIKE, and Lil Yachty. “But they don’t say anything about all of the AI processes in the backend of a video that makes your workflow easier. It’s all quickly consumed content for not as much money. So why not speed up the process?”

“It’s used a lot in post, like rotoscoping, if you want to take someone out of the background,” James adds. “This isn’t the kind of AI step we necessarily take issue with because it’s thought of as eliminating the time consuming tasks to allow someone to focus on their creativity.”

Meanwhile, in the rage rap scene, the trend of maximalist, hypersurreal videos done in a hybrid style—a blend of AI software and traditional Adobe Premiere effects—has taken hold. For example, the seizure-inducing Che videos worked on by Poppygavin and Noahsocold and 2Slimey’s unhinged parade of explosions and apocalyptic cut scenes. It’s treated as a part of their digitized and purposefully abrasive chaos.

“With 2Slimey, it’s baked into his brand; the AI looks super fucked up and the point is the intensity, the degradation, the slop—that’s gonna piss a bunch of people off,” says James. You can imagine an entire generation growing up on these videos who can barely remember a time when AI effects were anything other than the norm.

One of them is Mikey, a 21-year-old video editor, known for his bloody and eye-catching AI gore edits for internet rappers under the brand Painting Demons: The body horror transformations of lildre556’s “130 Bag” snippet, a demon bursting from Brennan Jones’ gut like that one scene in Alien. His hybrid style was inspired as much by the videos of OsamaSon and Che as the grotesque and troll-ish AI installations and graphics of early adopter Edward Skeletrix. (Mikey tells me about his “Prompt Bible,” where he keeps a massive list of the keywords and phrases he enters into the AI video maker Kling.)

At most these videos cost him a couple hundred dollars to create, a price point that made it possible for him to graduate from playing Minecraft with his brothers to video editing.

“It’s not really that deep. It’s not like we’re making songs, that’s when you’re really supposed to feel someone’s soul,” he says, on the phone from Virginia. “I just wanted to bring fire visuals to the underground. Now they can afford to do a bunch of crazy shit in their videos without having to tote guns or do drugs for attention.”

In hip-hop, there’s a tradition of making it work with whatever resources you got and engaging with technological advancements that may seem taboo: Bronx DJs in the 1970s powering their equipment by hooking the wires up to lampposts; T-Pain drowning his voice in Auto-Tune; plugg rappers recording through the mics of Apple earbuds. Innovation comes through scrappiness, like the gaudy Pen & Pixel graphics of the late ’90s, where the idea was to cut the budgets of flashy album cover shoots with low-cost photoshop techniques.

It’s easy to draw a through line from there to AI, though it’s not the same, because computerized T-Pain croons and Cash Money album covers didn’t also come attached with the contradictions and hypocrisies thrust on us from living in a techno dystopia. One in which the relatively unchecked and deep-pocketed tech giants are constantly working their hardest to convince the masses that AI is an invention that will change the world as we know it, while at the same time dodging criticisms—the heavily documented environmental and class impacts, increased political misinformation and their role in the weapons industries, shady self-policing tactics—by downplaying the product as a problem solving “tool” that simply exists to make life easier.

I asked JayJay if he shares those concerns—he nervously laughed.

“Yeah, my girl hits me with that,” he jokes. “I’m against AI brainrot videos because I think they’re part of an agenda to brainwash the mass public, but ethics and morality are such a crazy thing to go on in this world, man. It just depends if you’re thinking about it from a business standpoint or a creative standpoint.”

“Everyone fucking hates the way AI is taking over their lives,” James says. “Calling out a musician about it feels like a way someone feels like they can take a stand to the fact that at their fucking spreadsheet job, there’s a bunch of AI tools integrated into it that they didn’t have a choice about. Who wants to be reminded of that when they’re listening to music or watching a music video?”

Last fall, I wrote a positive review of 70th Street Carlos and WNC WhopBezzy’s joint Lousina jig album Out the Blue on Pitchfork. I got some fair online backlash for highlighting an album with AI cover art, which features Butt-Ugly Martians looking versions of the iced-out rappers posted up in front of a traphouse. Personally, the image didn’t phase me; I have become so numb to coming across cheap-ass AI cover art on SoundCloud and YouTube daily that I wasn’t surprised by two unsigned rappers from Baton Rouge with a barely mixed project cutting budgetary corners. But neutrality can sound like doomerism, like the war against AI has already been lost.

That same neutrality seems like it will only be to the benefit of the tech companies and CEOs looking to incorporate AI into every facet of our lives. Effectively putting us in a moral dilemma, where you don’t have much of a choice whether to use it or not. Just beating us down until we shift the goal posts and accept the new normal, which maybe has already happened.

And in a popular hip-hop landscape obsessed with moguldom more than ever—welcome back, Shawn Carter—the genre isn’t equipped to push back against the AI takeover in any substantial way. Look around, even the artists with huge budgets at their disposal are using AI. Flying Lotus and Kanye.

The AI lightning and blood splattering effects in YoungBoy’s “XXX” (he’s got bigger problems in the video like rapping in front of a slogan that reads “All Hail Trump”). The artificial luxury of Rick Ross’ “Minks In Miami” video, which includes AI images of a tiger resting on his shoulders and a Ross-branded speedboat racing through hellbound waters. “It’s the visual equivalent of the hollowing out of America,” James says, after I describe the video to him.

“Rick Ross—the guy selling us Maybach Music—doesn’t even have a real speedboat anymore.”