Attention Hip-Hop: Generative AI Is Not Your Friend
Several rap icons have taken to artificial intelligence as a bold step in the genre’s future. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Who let that robot say “nigga”? was my first thought when I heard a song by the AI-generated “rapper” FN Meka back in 2022. If you’re blessed enough to not know what’s up: FN Meka, created by a company called Factory New in 2019, was a digital stain who sported a robotic jaw, a radioactive green loc mohawk, and a voice that sounded like Tekashi 6ix9ine with laryngitis. Meka’s music and lyrics were supposedly developed with artificial intelligence, and if you listen closely enough to the sanitized beats and word-salad rhymes, it sounds like it. The public didn’t notice until 2022, when Meka became the first AI to sign to a major label, Capitol Records. A wave of backlash came swiftly after that.
The computational blackfishing was the first issue. “I don’t see no niggas like we playin’ hockey,” a line from breakthrough single “Moonwalkin’,” would be a wild statement to hear from AI even if it actually made sense. But the broader discourse skewed even darker: If labels could create their own artists out of thin air, what would that mean for artists in the flesh? As Kemi Olivia-Alemoru noted in a piece for Soho House, “FN Meka may not be flesh and blood, but he is the product of the key elements behind the death of creativity: capitalism, intellectual property theft, the hunger to profit from Black culture while shortchanging Black people, not to mention social media’s hard-on for trauma porn and the practice of reducing art to content.” Unsurprisingly, Meka was dropped from Capitol two weeks after signing. This was the first interaction with artificial intelligence in the music space for many, and it’s proven to be a harbinger for our collective descent into AI normalization over the last three years.