I was scrolling Twitter when I saw it. Kanye rapping in Lil RT’s exact cadence. Same flow, same delivery. Except it wasn’t Kanye. It wasn’t even real. It was AI.
People were reposting it like it was a meme. Some thought it was hard. Some thought it was wild. I just sat there stuck, trying to figure out why it felt so strange to hear a lesser-known artist’s whole sound filtered through one of the most iconic voices in rap.
The internet laughed. I didn’t.
We’ve always had mimicry in music. Influence, homage, biting. It’s not new. But AI speeds that up. It flattens the context. There’s no co-sign, no remix. Just a machine chewing someone up and spitting it back out in a more "recognizable" package.
And in this case, it wasn’t just a sound. It was a smaller artist’s identity, warped into something digestible by algorithms and fandoms. No credit. No conversation.
When Timeless leaked, nobody could agree on what they were hearing. It didn’t even sound human. Like Carti got swallowed by a fax machine and came out the other side whispering through a busted aux cable.
Immediately people were like, “Is this even him?” One Reddit post broke it down frame by frame — not even joking — and pointed out how the vocals matched the demo 1:1. No new recording. No mix tweaks. Just AI vocals, untouched.
One person said straight up, “It’s so obviously AI to anyone who’s played around with models before. Shit sounds choppy as hell. There’s no breath. It’s a soulless version of a Carti verse.”
Another was like, “Carti probably fed a reference track into a model and just used the result. Like didn’t even bother doing the real take.” And honestly? That tracks.
But no one from his team said anything. No confirmation. No denial. That’s how Carti moves though. He lets the confusion do the marketing. And because the track still bangs in its own weird way, most people just kept listening. The AI theory became part of the lore.
And maybe that’s the point. Not that it’s fake, but that it doesn’t matter anymore if it is. That’s where this is headed. If it sounds good, who cares where it came from? Carti’s been playing with identity for years. This just takes it to a new level — post presence, post authorship, post voice.
Here’s what worries me. AI doesn’t challenge the system. It reinforces it. It gives the biggest names more tools to siphon what’s bubbling in the underground without ever showing their face in the scene.
If someone like Carti or Kanye can generate entire tracks using unknown flows, who gets remembered? Who gets erased?
The artists still finding their voice, still uploading demos to SoundCloud, still experimenting in bedrooms — those are the ones most vulnerable. Because AI doesn’t need a name to steal from. It just needs a sound.
AI isn’t inherently evil. But when it’s used to replicate instead of amplify, we lose something. That tension. That unpredictability. That sense of someone trying to say something in their own voice, even if it’s messy.
The more we reward AI versions of underground styles, the more we teach the algorithm to favor simulation over risk. And the more we forget where those styles came from in the first place.
The Kanye clip might’ve made people laugh. But underneath the jokes, there’s something real: a future where originality isn’t killed by lack of talent — it’s drowned in noise.