For Hearing Things, Dylan Green wrote a great piece on notable rappers who have taken to artificial intelligence as a bold step in the genre’s future
and why that’s the wrong move. The article is paywalled beyond the first few paragraphs if you’ve read it once before but I managed to get a snippet. It’s about the backlash against The Alchemist & Erykah Badu’s single “Next To You” and its use of AI in the cover art and video. The Alchemist hit back at critics with some false equivalences like comparing AI to sampling and early hip hop DJing:
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 [The Alchemist] 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.
You see how André 3000 gets clowned for not rapping and just enjoying life with his flute music? He said he doesn’t have anything to rap about so he doesn’t. Madlib has said the same thing regarding Quasimoto. Just not rapping or making a certain type of music is also a choice if you feel you’ve reached a certain limit or space. AI does not need to fill in.
None of us need this and pretending that it’s about creative capabilities is disingenuous. It’s really about money and trying to control that source of income. But like so many things, litigation is gonna come for people and it won’t last (not before it damages lives like it already has in other ways).