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In April, a hot new track began circulating online, first appearing on streaming services including Spotify and Apple Music and then shared widely on social media platforms. The song, “Heart on My Sleeve,” was a fresh collaboration between pop royalty — rapper Drake and singer the Weeknd — with beats by <a href="https://www.thefader.com/2016/04/12/metro-boomin-cover-story-interview" target=_blank>esteemed producer Metro Boomin</a>. Or so it seemed.

Actually, the song, released by a TikToker named Ghostwriter977, had been created using artificial intelligence. Within days of the revelation, Universal Music Group had <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2023/04/26/ai-drake-weeknd/" target=_blank>successfully invoked copyright protections </a>and had the song removed from all streaming platforms.

This isn’t the first time AI has rocked the world of hip-hop. In 2022, FN Meka, an AI artist with 10 million followers on TikTok and more than a billion views, became the world’s first augmented reality star to sign with a major label, Capitol Records. But then Kyle the Hooligan, the Black artist whose lyricism and likeness inspired FN Meka, <a href="https://www.xxlmag.com/voice-behind-fn-meka-claims-creators-ghosted-never-received-payment/" target=_blank>revealed that he had not been paid</a> for his contributions. News spread that nearly all of those profiting off the AI artist were not Black and were barely affiliated with hip-hop culture and music at all. The record label promptly dropped FN Meka.

The introduction of AI into the production of hip-hop music has generated questions about how, not if, industry leaders and cultural outsiders will use this new technology to generate content and profit without paying rappers, songwriters, musicians, producers and engineers. These concerns are grounded in the history of hip-hop, which is <a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/rb-hip-hop/sugar-hill-records-sylvia-robinson-hip-hop-godmother-8533108/" target=_blank>rife with examples of exploitation and appropriation</a>. Yet this history also frequently reveals how artists have harnessed new technology to retain control and expand access to their art, ensuring hip-hop music remains democratic in its creation, earnings and enjoyment. Today’s artists can look to this history for inspiration as they decide whether AI will serve this tradition or break with it.

Some of the earliest hip-hop virtuosos were DJs who manipulated the audio equipment at their disposal to entertain their communities. At a time when a small group of conventional radio music programmers and mostly White nightclub managers dictated New York City music trends, Black and Latino youths from poor and working-class neighborhoods in the Bronx used common living room stereo equipment — turntables, speakers and receivers — to serve up crowd favorites and introduce new, thrilling ways to experience music.

In the early 1970s, Clive Campbell, a young Jamaican American performer known in the Bronx as DJ Kool Herc, manipulated two direct-drive Technics SL-1100A record players when he played music for his young crowds. With an <a href="https://www.rockhall.com/dj-kool-herc" target=_blank>invented technique he called “the Merry-Go-Round,”</a> Herc played a copy of the same record on both turntables, but as one played the song’s breakdown, he back-cued the other to the beginning of the same breakdown, extending seconds of the funkiest segment into several minutes of danceable breaks.

Building upon Herc’s design, Joseph Saddler, a.k.a. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/08/23/grandmaster-flash-on-the-get-down-and-how-he-used-science-to-pioneer-dj-techniques/" target=_blank>Grandmaster Flash, invented his own “Quick Mix Theory”</a> in which he played just the breakdowns from many different songs one after another, providing an extended “mix” of the most exciting breaks of all the hottest records in his collection, creating space for “breakdancers” to showcase their skills and later for MCs to rap. Soon after, Grand Wizzard Theodore (Theodore Livingston) further altered the way turntables translated vinyl grooves into audio. <a href="https://music.si.edu/story/grand-wizzard-theodores-turntables-smithsonian-year-music-object-day-august-13" target=_blank>Theodore introduced the percussive technique known today as “scratching,”</a> a staple of hip-hop production.

In the 1980s, with the introduction of cassette tape dubbing technology, hip-hop artists saw opportunities to use duplication tools to create avenues for success typically available only through extremely elusive recording and distribution deals.

Ambitious rappers and DJs from impoverished California cities and without access to major label resources — for instance, Too $hort (Todd Shaw) in East Oakland and <a href="https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/weapon-mass-destruction" target=_blank>Toddy Tee (Todd Howard)</a> and Mixmaster Spade (Frank Williams) in Compton — helped develop the art of pause-record cassette tape mixes and employed dual-play cassette decks to create their own original products. These were copied and sold for cash to friends and, eventually, avid fans, while artists retained control over their recorded “masters” and kept the profits from these DIY independently owned recording and distribution enterprises.

Over the next decades, younger generations of southern and Midwestern hip-hop musicians, who had grown up with a passion for the rich sound of full-band recordings, recognized that they lacked access to the range of instruments, training and professional studio space to replicate those records. These artists used available technologies — sometimes pooling resources to do so — to create the sounds they wanted to hear with the equipment they could afford.

In Atlanta in the early 1990s, aspiring rapper Big Rube (Ruben Bailey) <a href="https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-big-rube-became-the-spoken-word-oracle-of-southern-rap/" target=_blank>emptied his bank account</a> to spend $2,000 on an Akai MPC60 sequencing device to share with a chosen family of other passionate self-made artists, including a team of producers who called themselves Organized Noize. In the unfinished basement of member Rico Wade’s mother’s home, the Dungeon Family was born. The producers taught themselves music sampling, editing and drum pattern production, eventually engineering creations for artists like Goodie Mob, TLC and Future and helping <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2004/02/09/the-grammys-hip-hop-parade/cd0ace41-b367-49a8-a281-5775594d50fc/" target=_blank>Outkast become the first hip-hop group to earn a Grammy for Album of the Year</a>.

Even as hip-hop became entrenched in the musical mainstream, artists continued to break ground and inspire using new technologies. Perhaps most notably, Detroit producer J Dilla (James Yancey) managed to “<a href="https://www.gawker.com/culture/dilla-time-dan-charnas-review" target=_blank>reinvent rhythm</a>.” Using a newer MPC device, he created and sampled rhythm sequences in “perfect time” and then manipulated them to be deliberately polyrhythmic, creating a unique kind of production sound that was, according to award-winning filmmaker, drummer and producer Questlove, <a href="https://variety.com/2022/music/news/dilla-time-dan-charnas-1235168292/" target=_blank>“so perfectly imperfect that it redefined the way I thought about art.” </a>

In the early 2000s, rapper and singer T-Pain (Faheem Rashad Najm) catapulted his career by using the pitch-correcting Auto-Tune software — a tool first introduced on Cher’s 1998 single “Believe” — on his 2007 self-produced album “Epiphany.” Inspired by “Believe,” and following in the innovative footsteps of Zapp’s Roger Troutman, who made use of the “talk box,” an older, distinct vocal modification technology, T-Pain crafted a new, space-age signature sound for himself. He took a widely available digital tool that some feared might make singers sound inauthentic, and he pushed the limits of its effects to introduce something that sounded cutting-edge and helped lead hip-hop into the new digital age.

More recently, a St. Louis teenager named Leland Wayne <a href="https://www.thefader.com/2016/04/12/metro-boomin-cover-story-interview" target=_blank>spent hours experimenting</a> with a keyboard, MP3s and Frooty Loops production software to transform himself into Metro Boomin, one of the most sought-after producers in modern hip-hop — and the artist whose musical style was reproduced for the AI-created “Heart on My Sleeve.”

Hip-hop history can be viewed as a history of technological innovation; creative uses of technology have helped advance the art form and given young talents the power to shape the industry. The question now, however, is whether the latest artificial intelligence technology will present new opportunities as well as new risks.

Hip-hop artists are already employing AI tools for inspiration, just as they have done with new technology in the past. AI is also creating new avenues for hip-hop production, allowing broader access to the craft, just as sequencers, samplers and software have done for artists since the 1980s. When asked if he has concerns about the technology, <a href="https://www.grammy.com/artists/salaam-remi/6547" target=_blank>Grammy Award-winning music producer Salaam Remi</a> said, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cr98HxnppUG/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==" target=_blank>“There’s going to be something that the AI won’t be able to do, but also I can use the AI to do stuff I don’t want to do.”</a>

Still, compared with new technological innovations of the past, AI may prove a more unwieldy challenge to creators as they seek to retain control over their work. As A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip rapped,<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QWEPdgS3As" target=_blank> </a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QWEPdgS3As" target=_blank>“</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QWEPdgS3As" target=_blank>industry rule #4080<i> — </i>record company people are shady</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QWEPdgS3As" target=_blank>.”</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QWEPdgS3As" target=_blank> </a>Seeking profit without crediting artists and innovators would not be unprecedented.

Some hip-hop artists — probably with the help of powerful corporate entities like Universal Music Group — may find ways to ride the AI wave and remain beneficiaries of their own innovations. But it’s also possible that this may be a watershed moment when new technology, by allowing the dissemination of forgeries, works to separate artists from their art, thereby making the music less democratic, not more.

A.D. Carson is assistant professor of hip-hop & the Global South in the department of music at the University of Virginia. His most recent album is "talking to ghosts" and his academically peer-reviewed album, "i used to love to dream," was published by University of Michigan Press in 2020.

A.D. Carson

Felicia Angeja Viator is associate professor of history at San Francisco State University, a curator for the GRAMMY Museum and author of "To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America" (Harvard University Press, 2020).