Attention Hip-Hop: Generative AI Is Not Your Friend

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. 

In 2025, does creativity really come down to prompts typed into AI generators crafted by tech companies from Apple to Google to Canva? People talk to bots like ChatGPT as if they’re therapists or lovers, all while the facilities powering it are poisoning the air and using obscene amounts of water and electricity to make you look like a Studio Ghibli character or create sexual deepfakes of your crush. Of course, music hasn’t been spared, either. Software can create drum loops, samples, and entire beats with one click, and labels are tripping over themselves to license the music of their artists to companies like Suno and Udio for training AI models to replicate it. The slope generative AI has created is sheer and slippery: Not only are creatives of every stripe at risk of being replaced by money-hungry companies who’d rather work the robots for cheap labor, the quality of the art and music and literature created with these generators is generally dogshit. 

Examples are everywhere, even in the world of hip-hop, where the best rappers and producers live and die by the originality of their styles. You can’t scroll through the Instagram feeds of artists like Questlove or Snoop Dogg without seeing overly stylized, poorly rendered visuals collapsing into themselves. Snoop incorporated AI into the music videos for his latest album Iz It A Crime? One of them, for the single “Sophisticated Crippin’,” features current-day Snoop looking like he dipped himself in a vat of Vaseline, sifting through iconic moments in his career or made to look like a Norse god or some other fantasy. The whole enterprise veers into the deepest caverns of the uncanny valley.

Snoop isn’t the only legend to put his weight behind this dangerous trend. Timbaland, no stranger to embracing new creative opportunities, has been a vocal supporter of AI’s integration into music. He recently caught flack earlier this month when he unveiled Stage Zero, an entertainment company he co-founded, and its first “signing,” an AI artist named Tata. Outside of the general ethical queasiness, evidence suggests he’d used the work of Seattle producer K Fresh without permission to train the software that created Tata. This isn’t Timbaland’s first legal dustup involving other people’s music, and for a producer who spends most of his time these days hosting listening sessions with up-and-coming beatmakers on TikTok, allegedly stealing from that crop is a bad look. 

One of the loudest detractors was engineer to the stars and longtime friend Young Guru. “These are the times, right here, that history is defined…Human expression can never be reduced to this!!! This is way bigger than music!!! I say this in all love.” he said in an Instagram comment. They eventually moved to Instagram Live for a heated four-hour debate on the subject. One of Guru’s points that stuck out to me was about how taste can be warped or even erased by the use of training models, using the example of someone with no experience playing jazz music asking a program to generate a song that’s 25% John Coltrane and 10% Thelonious Monk. “Why would I want to hear your version of [Coltrane]? That’s his expression, not yours,” he emphasized.

Timbaland responded by comparing his companies like Suno to any other music-making resource and claiming that the programmer’s taste is the ultimate driver of the finished product. But even if that were the case, it doesn’t address the murky morality of tricking other musicians into training AI models, which companies will use to cut corners at best and replace their human counterparts at worst. Like many who have been suckered into the tech bro mentality, Timbaland believes he’s ahead of the curve and his critics are just squares with no vision. The apology he put out on Friday afternoon dodged any real accountability, instead leaning further into milquetoast ideas of “building tools with creators” that he really stole from. 

Erykah Badu and Alchemist recently fell into a similarly hot pot. Last week, the Texas singer and California superproducer released “Next To You,” the lead single from their highly anticipated collaborative album, with Sonic Youth-referencing cover art and a visualizer done in Peanuts-style animation, both of which were clearly made using AI. It’s less noticeable on the cover—the text on Al’s boombox is pure chicken scratch—but the video borders on the disturbing, flashing the telltale signs of prompt-based creation. Floating music notes crumble and fold into themselves like balls of paper; the flat and unengaging character designs shift perspective from scene to scene; hands, fingers, and lips phase and disintegrate from frame to frame, often out of sync with the music. It looks like a half-finished storyboard, which tracks with the song itself, little more than Badu cooing sweet nothings over a rehashed version of Alchemist’s 26-year-old beat for Mobb Deep’s “The Realest.”

The backlash from fans and fellow artists was massive, prompting Alchemist to spend most of the song’s release day ribbing critics and getting defensive on Twitter. “I listen to music with my eyes closed,” he said in a now-deleted tweet replying to a user saying many wouldn’t listen to the song because of the cover and video. “It should be [a] case study how people just assume things on here, then make whole theories, commentaries, and get distraught lol,” he replied to another. It’s worth noting both the song and the video were released via Badu’s record label, Control Freaq Records, as opposed to Alchemist’s ALC Records, and Badu, who hasn’t tweeted since April, hasn’t addressed the controversy at all. But regardless of whose idea all this was, both their names and likenesses are being used, and they’re ultimately endorsing the use of AI in their craft. 

What’s even more concerning is Alchemist making the same false equivalency about AI as Timbaland. In other since-deleted tweets, he chastised people for complaining about AI from a cell phone (“a cell phone,” according to him, “is AI. Think about that.” Sure, Alc!) and compared the use of AI to the innovations that fostered the birth of hip-hop: “‘Yo Grandmaster Flash, chilll! You can’t be touching the record and moving the turntable like that! Thats not real music! You are a disgrace to those that play real instruments!’ - you if u were alive in the 80’s.” Plenty of other artists followed suit, including North Carolina rapper Rapsody: “Badu has always been ahead of time. Especially for those who don’t like to grow & evolve—it disturbs their boxed-in comfort. Stay in ya box. That’s fine. Just don’t come spilling your mess around other folks gardens.” 

It can be difficult to get through to creatives who’ve turned their passions into sustainable careers. Many of the rappers and producers mentioned in this article have been working professionals for decades, have contributed timeless classics to the culture, and established—or circumvented—trends and become icons in the process. To them, AI is just the next phase, an undeniable future with boundless possibilities, and they’re getting in on the ground floor as they always have. But scratching and sampling records is not the same thing as feeding work made by humans to a machine in an effort to help it make comparable music.

Other critics, like Watts producer Dibiase, counter that “If you’re irreplaceable whether you create visual art or make beats, AI can’t replace you so I wouldn’t feel threatened.” But if things continue to move at the pace they currently are, and big artists continue to utilize it, it won’t matter who makes the best art. To these companies, it will only matter who—or what—makes the cheapest, most accessible product. Why pay a human who will command a heftier price tag, never mind all that pesky eating and sleeping they have to do, when you could just generate something good enough in hours or minutes? Typing a prompt isn’t the same thing as adjusting equalizer settings, splicing loops in a sequencer, or playing out samples on a drum pad. Not in a world where taking the easy way out is choking the planet and destroying innocent lives; not in a genre where artists struggling to make ends meet have to deal with another technology looking to force them out. Songs like the Drake and Weekend deepfake “Heart on my Sleeve” by the anonymous producer Ghostwriter sound like exactly what they are: pale imitations of style that can’t stand up to the real thing. FN Meka should’ve been a warning that theft and destruction were about to be normalized. A computer is a tool; generative AI is a cheat sheet with half the answers missing.