In the past week, the feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake has entered a new, more modern realm than any rap beef before: AI.
As the back-and-forth has escalated, and fans wait to see what each of the hip-hop heavyweights will say next, a series of fan-made diss tracks have started circulating on social media using AI voices to mimic the emcees. And while some were obviously not real—and, thankfully, were voluntarily called AI by their authors—others were more convincing, leading to widespread confusion.
People wondered if Drake's “Push Ups” was real (it was), and if Lamar's supposed response, “1 Shot 1 Kill” was also real (it wasn't). YouTube is full of more AI iterations, and some are garnering large audiences, including one called “To Kill A Butterfly,” which has garnered 508,000 views to date. To make matters even more complicated, Drake himself joined the trend, using AI to reproduce the voices of the West Coast legends Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg in his “Taylor Made” diss, which was released on X and Instagram on Friday without their permission, prompting Shakur's estate to send Drake a cease and desist letter.
The phenomenon has shown the significant impact AI has already had on modern fandom, as eager fans use AI creation tools to fill in gaps in the conversation and imagine further stories with a type of incredible precision never before possible. And for better or worse, it has become the most prominent use case of genetic artificial intelligence in the music industry to date.
This trend of using artificial intelligence has its roots in Ghostwriter, the controversial TikTok user who faked the voices of Drake and The Weeknd in his song “Heart On My Sleeve” a year ago in April 2023. On a cover for Advertising signthe Ghostwriter and his manager initially compared the AI voice filters to a form of “fan fiction — a genre of music created by fans,” as the manager put it.
Traditional, written fan fiction has been a way for fans to engage with their favorite media for decades — whether it's franchises like Star Wars, Miracle the Twilight, or the music of stars like Drake and Lamar. In it, fans can expand on details that were never fully fleshed out in the original work and write their own stories and ending. AI fan creations inspired by Drake and Lamar's beef do something similar, leaving music fans to imagine the artist's next move and image collaborations that have yet to happen.
Historically, fan fiction is great for the original artist from a marketing perspective. It's one of the many forms of user-generated content (UGC) on the internet today that can get more fans involved with the original work without the author having to lift a finger.
But with traditional fanfiction, fans could easily tell where the official canon began and ended, and writing was often relegated to top places like Watt Pad, Discord, Reddit, or fan zines. This new form of “AI fanfiction” makes that distinction much less obvious and spreads it much more widely. For now, trained ears can still tell when AI voices are being used in this way today, given the slight glitch that still exists in audio quality, but soon these models will be so good that distinguishing AI from in reality it will be almost impossible.
There's still no good way to tell for sure which songs use AI and which don't, and to make matters worse, these fan-made songs are more often posted on general social media platforms than written fan fiction. In a search for this rap beef on X or YouTube, listeners are likely to encounter a few AI fan tracks along the way, and many lack the expertise of a superfan to sniff out and differentiate between what's real and what's not. false.
In an age where fans demand non-stop connection and content from their favorite talents, it's especially common for fans of elusive artists to take matters into their own hands with AI tools — including voices as well as other creative works like images, videos and text . In the absence of Kendrick's response to Drake last week, for example, “1 Shot 1 Kill” was produced by a 23-year-old Sy The Rapper fan. In an interview with Complex, Sy said he used the Voicify tool to imagine Lamar on the track. (Notably, the RIAA recently listed Voicify on the US government's piracy watch list).
Followers of famously elusive artist Frank Ocean have also been having fun with genetic AI over the past year, with one fan, @tannerchauct, showing others on X how to create their own alternative versions of Ocean's album using DALLE-2 , an image generator. A Cardi B fan, @iYagamiLight, even dreamed up the creative direction for a completely fictional Cardi B project with AI, garnering thousands of retweets in October. The user's cover featured Cardi B in a bedazzled corset and posing in a clawfoot bathtub with peacock feathers fluttering around her. They also created a fake tracklist and release date.
The downside of fan works has always been the same: they tend to infringe on the artist's copyright, use an artist's name, image, voice or likeness without permission, or generally profit from the artist's work without they share the spoils. This new age of AI and UGC fan fiction makes all of these pre-existing problems exponentially harder to police.
Cardi B's fan, for example, didn't reveal that their work was AI-generated or fictional, instead conflating their creative direction with the misleading caption “Cardi B just announced her highly anticipated sophomore album 'Mayura' to be released on Friday, January 12, 2024!”
At a recent music law conference at Vanderbilt University, Colin Rushingthe general counsel of the Digital Media Association (DiMA) played down the commercial impact of AI in music so far, saying that, since Ghostwriter, “one of the things we really haven't seen in [last] year is an epidemic of “fake-Drakes” climbing the charts. We don't see popular examples of this in the commercial market.”
Haste is right – that hasn't happened yet. Even Drake's own AI-assisted song isn't on streaming services and thus isn't eligible for the charts. (And if the lawyer for Tupac's estate has his way, he'll soon be removed from the Internet entirely.) But this rap controversy revealed that while it hasn't affected the charts or the “commercial market” all that much, it has affected something. even more important for an artist today: the fans.
