After years of leaks, occasional singles and rare live appearances, rap phenomenon Playboi Carti has released his third studio album. Simply titled MUSIC, the record set the internet and fan circles ablaze when it appeared on streaming services on March 14 – but less than a week on, keen-eared fans suspect something’s not quite right.
To say the impact of MUSIC has been massive so far would be an understatement. Opening track POP OUT has already racked up more than 10 million streams on Spotify, and the album ropes in collaborators from the scene’s highest echelon – legends from Carti’s hometown of Atlanta including Future and Young Thug, pop superstars such as The Weeknd, plus of course rap heavyweight Kendrick Lamar, who checks in for not one, but three guest appearances.
This didn’t stop fans from scrutinizing every second of the album, though – quite the opposite. With so few releases and appearances in the past few years, Carti’s massive fanbase took to the new record like fresh water in the desert, ripping through its 30 tracks and immediately posting reactions and discussions to online platforms like Reddit.
Carti – real name Jordan Carter – is no stranger to controversy, but the release of MUSIC sparked an altogether new debate. Fans began to suspect the presence of AI vocals throughout the long-awaited album; specifically alleging Carti used AI to mimic his own voice, with some suggesting that The Weeknd’s feature verses may have been altered too.
To clarify, I mostly found Reddit threads debating whether two tracks on the album (RATHER LIE and FINE ****), utilize AI, with commenters sitting on both sides of the argument. “Genuinely pathetic” says user dat_grue, while user whatsongisdat says “who cares it’s mid either way”.
Whatever you make of it, using AI is a pretty stark allegation for an artist whose only instrument is his voice. With so much of rap music’s history based in the authenticity and honesty of individual MCs and with Carti taking so long to supposedly work on this new record, any suggestion of using AI to take a shortcut was bound to cause an uproar.
RATHER LIE?
Now, I’ve been pretty vocal about my distaste for AI, especially generative AI. I find it totally backwards to hand creative work – perhaps the defining ability of humanity – to totally automated processes.
I’m not saying AI can’t be used as a tool for legitimate artistry. Stem separation, where songs are split into their instrument parts with extremely reactive and sophisticated EQ and volume changes for more streamlined sampling, is one great example. But as a replacement? No thanks. If these rumors turn out to be true, I’d feel let down that one of the most popular artists in the world, one with major label backing, has been allowed to take the easy route.
With that all said, it’s not really the potential inclusion of AI that truly unsettles me in this case – it’s that I don’t think I’d be able to tell the difference.
And right now, no artist (or producer) is obliged to disclose whether what we're hearing was ever actually uttered from our beloved artist's mouths, or played by their hands.
AI text, image, and video generators have worked their way into public view over the past few years – Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and DALL.E are fairly well known examples. However, the presence of AI in music is increasingly part of the conversation – and part of production – even if the technologies behind it are substantially less well known.
In August 2024, I came across a new single from dance music producer Dan Snaith under his Caribou alias titled Volume, a rework of the iconic house track Pump Up The Volume by MARRS. What I didn’t know beforehand, or indeed realise until I read it elsewhere, was that the female vocal that glides through the background of Caribou’s version is, in fact, Dan Snaith singing into an AI processor.
I was stunned – firstly by how natural everything sounded, and then by the fact that, despite considering myself a tech-savvy music lover, I hadn’t sensed something was even different about this vocal.
It’s a similar story with MUSIC. When I first came across these AI accusations, I did a mental scan of the album and found… nothing. Even now, nothing seems particularly out of place against Carti’s characteristically chaotic delivery and already machinic production. I just wouldn’t be able to tell.
GOOD CREDIT
At this point, you may be asking why people should care – whether or not AI is used on MUSIC, the end result probably sounds the same. However, I think forgiving its use so easily could set a dangerous precedent.
As my TechRadar colleague Rowan Davies recently reported, a coalition of more than 1,000 musicians recently released an album consisting of silence and studio ambience to protest the growing threat AI poses to music and the music industry.
The silent album, titled Is This What We Want?, protests proposed UK legislation that would allow AI developers to appropriate copyrighted music for the sake of training AI, effectively bypassing the rights of the musicians to be reimbursed and recognized for their contribution to the eventual output.
Enmeshing AI with the music itself would make it a whole lot harder to make for the music industry to resist the rising tide of consumption and redistribution that happens when AI takes from existing material. If you ask me, AI cannot be inspired – it lacks the human capacity to create and therefore cannot be considered to make anything legitimately new. As such, involving AI in the creation of music is damaging not only to musicians’ already tight pockets, but their role in society too.
At the very least, I’d like to see some kind of mandatory warning label on streaming services, like the “E” icon that marks songs with explicit language, to denote the use of AI in a track. This would still require self-reporting from artists and labels, but it’s the best I can imagine platforms like Spotify and Apple Music having the capacity to implement.
I’m expecting Playboi Carti to scoop up plenty of great reviews and possibly some awards for MUSIC. To myself and others raised on SoundCloud rap and the mid-pandemic hyperpop explosion, it’s the first genuinely monolithic record of the year. I just hope these rumors of using AI vocals are proven to be just that, rumors and nothing more, for the sake of the music industry at large.
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