The Drake-Kendrick Beef and Musings on the Future of AI-Generated Content

As one of the world's biggest popstars, Drake AI "covers" have proliferated since last year. Last week he turned the tables, signaling how we'll encounter synthetic content in the future.

Apr 22, 2024

By now you’re probably aware of the Drake-Kendrick Lamar beef, which has kicked into high gear over the past month. If so, skip the bullet points—but since it’s salient background for the discussion that follows, I’ll quickly recap the main beats:

Drake and Kendrick have maintained a simmering dislike for each other for at least a decade. Other than subliminal jabs it’s never spilled over into public confrontation.
Drake releases For All the Dogs in October 2023, which includes lead single “First Person Shooter” with J. Cole. In the song, J. Cole raps: “Love when they argue the hardest MC / Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me? / We the big three like we started a league, but right now, I feel like Muhammad Ali.” The “big three” here refers to the mythology of Drake, J. Cole, and Kendrick being the best rappers of the 2010s. In the same song Drake pronounces himself the GOAT.
On March 22, 2024, rapper Future and producer Metro Boomin release a collaborative album titled We Don’t Trust You. The track “Like That” features a verse by Kendrick Lamar, who takes direct aim at Drake (and J. Cole…but mainly Drake), saying “Motherf*** the big three, n****, it's just big me” among a host of other direct and indirect provocations.
Drake, Future, and Metro Boomin have all worked together in the past, but rumors had been mounting since late 2023 that Metro Boomin and Future were beefing with Drake, stemming from perceived disses directed at the producer in For All the Dogs.
On April 5, J. Cole releases a response track that is ambivalent (at best), prompting this gem from critic Alphonse Pierre’s Pitchfork review: “Who the f*** wants to hear this extremely measured and level-headed assessment of Kendrick’s albums in a diss track?”
Future and Metro Boomin release another collaborative album on April 12, which includes more words for Drake, this time not from Kendrick Lamar but directly from Future, and broadening to include other former Drake collaborators A$AP Rocky and The Weeknd.
On April 13, a demo version of the song “Push Ups” leaks. It’s attributed to Drake, but since it didn’t come from any of his official channels, there’s speculation that it might be AI-generated. It’s very much a diss directed at all of the above, as well as Rick Ross, who had unfollowed Drake on Instagram.
On April 15, Rick Ross enters the fray with “Champagne Moments,” a Drake diss accusing Drake of getting cosmetic surgeries like a nosejob, and includes the much-discussed line, “I know you got your Dockers on with no underwear, white boy!”
On April 19, Drake officially releases “Push Ups” in its final form, which features stronger production and a few notable lyrical tweaks. On the same day, Drake releases another diss via Twitter and Instagram, titled “Taylor Made Freestyle.” This track will be the focus of the discussion from here.

Note: I encourage you to listen to the various disses. They’re all worthwhile listens, with the exception of “7 Minute Drill.”

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“Taylor Made Freestyle” and the New Iteration of Drake AI Weirdness

Last year, a couple AI Drake covers—namely “heart on my sleeve,” by an TikTok user ghostwriter977—went viral. Listen here if you haven’t heard it. Note: what “AI cover” generally refers to is someone using AI voice tools (and in some cases AI instrumentation) to produce work “as” a given artist. In other words, a human writes the song and sings/raps, using a voice clone to mimic the style of the artist being “covered.” Drake is one of the most well-known pop stars in the world; naturally his work would be an early target for such creative experimentation.

“Heart on my sleeve” sparked conversations about the future of IP and creative ownership in a context of ubiquitous generative AI tools. There have been plenty of fun AI covers since then—a personal favorite is “Somebody That I Used to Know” in the style of Linkin Park—but, as tends to happen, as the tools have become more accessible and general knowhow increases, novelty fades. By and large, these now operate more as memes than meaningful competition for the respective artists’ bottom lines. Artists and platforms are figuring out how to label synthetic content and how to foster community participation through collaborative economic models.

“Taylor Made Freestyle,” though, is by a major artist. Drake does appear in the song, but not until we’ve heard from AI versions of 2pac and Snoop Dogg. The two icons of West Coast hip hop exhort heir apparent Kendrick Lamar to rise to the occasion and respond to Drake’s “Push Ups.” For his part, Snoop Dogg (the human being) handled the whole thing with the Internet equivalent of an eyeroll, saying, “They did what? When? How? Are you sure? … I’m going back to bed,” in an Instagram video.

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Given that, Drake may not find himself in legal peril (though, hey, still plenty of time!), but this form of AI recreation sparks copyright, fair use, and other ethical considerations. No, Drake isn’t monetizing the song, but it’s hard to argue that using this tactic won’t yield any indirect economic benefits—streams, increases in followers on social media, press coverage, interest in investment properties, et al. Is it parody? I guess you could argue it is—but then you could also meaningfully argue that it’s not. What data was used to train the voice models? Did Drake use an existing voice model of these artists, or did he/his camp train and finetune them?

I also find myself wondering about the creative implications. Drake used the fact that he’s the subject of AI covers, and the fact that many wondered if his own work were in fact an AI cover, and flipped the script. Puckish as the prank may be, there is real creative innovation here. The silly and almost throwaway aspect of 2pac and Snoop Dogg’s features in the track likely insulate Drake from legal blowback, and simultaneously hack the game of discoverability on social media. This is designed (ahem, tailor-made, if you will) for a public spat of this nature, but there are plenty of other use cases in which we might imagine guest features—ones that are endorsed by the respective artists or by the estate/rights holders (if the artist is deceased, as in the case of Tupac Shakur). And let’s not even go too far down the road of what this might mean for blockbuster biopics and jukebox musicals…

We were already inevitably going to see synthetic songs and guest features by artists of yore, but I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more a lot sooner thanks to this diss track. I wrote about how AI interacts with genre last year, and I’m wondering about a lot of the same things right now—how exactly will this zombiism impact audience expectations in art and creativity (in music and beyond)? What aspects of artists’ outputs will become the “signature” elements that get reproduced, and how will the reproductions impact them as artists and the broader development of art forms, aesthetics, and pop culture? Last year’s Wes Anderson AI trend was the jump-off point to the article I wrote on AI and genre. It was a playful edge case that provoked quite a few questions about how synthetic creativity can, might, and will become commonplace. This Drake diss moment feels to me like another such instance.

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