AI-Generated Tracks Mud The Drake Versus Everybody Rap Feud

Drake's new track “Push Up,” a diss directed at Kendrick Lamar, Rick Ross, The Weeknd and more, had the rap world buzzing on Saturday. Then, shortly after, Rick Ross' response, “Champagne Stories,” made a remarkable day one to remember. Hip hop heads of a certain age were hit with a wave of nostalgia thanks to the way both songs were released. A clip of “Push Up” made the rounds on Reddit and Twitter before DJ Akademiks legitimized the track and played a studio-quality version on his stream. Rick Ross then sent his response to Akademiks a few hours later.

The two veteran rappers took us back to when songs weren't just uploaded to streaming platforms at midnight. Major singles, especially diss tracks, almost always went through a step-by-step process before the full version reached the public. The song might end up on the radio, on a message board, or on a blog, and people would play that lower-quality version until we finally got the studio-quality file—then called CDQ, referring to the now-obsolete term “CD quality . ” Fans of Drake's 36-year-old know that the time for big clothes, rap disses filled with Funkmaster Flex bombs and rapidshare file-sharing links.

It was Drake, promoting his poetry book Titles ruin everything taking out full-page ads in newspapers across the country last year, trying to replicate that energy of the 2006 era? Questions remain about how “Push Up” was released. Did the song leak on purpose to gauge the response before we stamp it as real? Was The Weeknd's Report On Drake's Crew Leaks On Future And Metro Boomin's 'All To Myself' Correct? But the most troubling question is the first one we all had when we heard the first version of “Push Up:” Was it real or AI?

Fans surprised that a song of this magnitude was leaked speculated that it must have been the work of artificial intelligence, which quickly became more prevalent in the rap world. TikTok has been flooded with apparent fake Drake chats, so it's no surprise that Many fans wondered if a troll decided to write lyrics to Drake's enemies, recite them, and then put them into the rapper's voice. However, even before Akademiks' confirmation, most listeners felt the quality of the song's vocal inflections — and the baseball references in Kendrick and The Weeknd's manager XO Cash's contract — confirmed the track as real.

That wasn't the case with Drake and Kendrick's subsequent fake discographies that surfaced on Monday. These songs were much easier to smell because of the harsh vocals. One Twitter account claimed that the Kendrick song they uploaded would be released in full on April 16, clearly trying to pass it off as real. On Saturday, informed music fans teased that some fans would believe that artificial intelligence is advanced enough to reproduce what we heard from “Push Up.” But there will come a day when AI technology will evolve beyond the discernment of even these experts, and this will represent yet another weapon in the toolbox of people who want to cheat the music world. Rap fans hungry to hear the next installments in the Drake vs.

Last year, an AI music creator named Ghostwriter dropped a fake Weeknd and Drake song called “Heart on My Sleeve” that he planned to submit for a Grammy (after “Push Up,” AI is probably the only way to hear something similar a Drake and The Weeknd collaboration). Eventually, the song was pulled from streaming and record labels put safeguards in place to prevent commercial retailing of AI vocals. Universal Music Group, which houses Drake and the Weeknd, asked DSPs to block AI services from using their platforms to create their database. And last October, music publishers Universal, Concord and ABKCO filed suit for copyright infringement against AI company Anthropic, setting a precedent for how the industry's infrastructure will deal with AI services. But these developments haven't stopped people from deciding to use AI for fun – even Ghostwriter recently released a full-fledged AI music project.

Last May, Timbaland posted a snippet on Instagram of a song he concocted with AI vocals featuring the Notorious B.I.G. song. it sounded like Biggie to him but was no doubt referring to modern slang like “you don't give a damn”. Responses to the song have been mixed and Timbaland has not officially released the song. Recently, Playboi Carti fans eagerly awaiting his next album dropped an entire fake Carti project with AI vocals. One of the comments on an Instagram post promoting the AI ​​album noted: “If you enjoy AI music, you don't know what to say other than rethink everything.”

There are too many consequences for fake news: disinformation will further poison a blogosphere already rampant with fake news presented with unclear sources. Rap fans will now have to eliminate pitch shifts, rhyming phrasing, and digital artifacts while evaluating the validity of a track. The suspense of waiting for the next diss will be ruined because we'll keep coming across fakes and eventually feel like “it's time” to get the real thing.

Fake pieces may also tread on approaches that the artists planned to explore in their real trials. Will fans accuse the artists of using the fake discography for help if they hear similar lines? And while we know Drake and Kendrick are already at odds, what happens when the AI ​​creators decide to create discord between artists who don't have issues? There are artists less astute than Kendrick or Drake who might be fooled by an AI diss against them, lash out and say something to another artist they can't take back, and then things get real before they even happen. real.