AI Tools Spread Across Hip-Hop Videos as 21-Year-Old Editors Cut Costs to Hundreds of Dollars
Updated
Updated · Pitchfork · Jun 5
AI Tools Spread Across Hip-Hop Videos as 21-Year-Old Editors Cut Costs to Hundreds of Dollars
3 articles · Updated · Pitchfork · Jun 5
Summary
AI visuals have become hard to avoid in hip-hop videos, from fully generated clips to brief effects and backend post-production tools that increasingly shape how rap visuals are made.
Hundreds of dollars can now buy effects that once required far bigger budgets, helping young editors such as 21-year-old Mikey build careers by making AI-heavy gore and surrealist videos for underground rappers.
Labels are starting to reject obvious AI in finished videos, but videographers say they still rely on AI-assisted processes such as rotoscoping and cleanup because fast-turnaround content leaves little money for manual work.
rage rap has embraced a hybrid AI style on purpose, using degraded, hypersurreal imagery as part of artists' brands even as some musicians and video workers call the technology anti-social and morally corrosive.
That tension is widening across hip-hop: a genre long shaped by scrappy technological experimentation is normalizing AI at the same time critics warn that acceptance mainly serves tech companies pushing it into everyday life.