Last year, Kasher Quon dropped a music video that uses the Detroit scam rapper’s ridiculously vivid and sometimes offensive punchlines as prompts for a batshit AI cartoon. In “Transported,” a dude with a small afro has a shaking fit at a liquor store counter as a group of Asian caricatures watch him in confusion (“Yo’ bum ass mad the liquor store just ran out of beer”) and a balding Italian man yells at his pizza boy for flashing money into his phone camera on the job (“Shouldn’t be posting banks on the ’Gram if you work at Happy’s, he at a pizza place”). Then, to get darker, a mustached cartel leader is detained by ICE agents (“My plug ain’t supposed to be here, his ass got deported”) and a man overdoses on fentanyl in the recording booth (“My opp just bought a percocet, I hope that bitch fent”). In less than two minutes, there’s about a dozen other scenes just like these, including a bunch that feature Kasher’s AI avatar doing stuff he could easily do without AI: Count money, fill a styrofoam cup with lean, eat dinner at a steakhouse.
“Transported” is by far one of the stupidest rap videos I’ve seen in a minute, but it’s been on my mind in a why does this exist way ever since. It doesn’t feel like AI just for the sake of AI, instead part of an absurd artistic vision that makes sense coming from the edgy, no-budget world of Detroit scam rap. In that vision, he’s sort of like the last man on Earth meets Robin Hood, spending his days coming up with schemes in the aisles of nearly empty department stores, outside of closed banks, and inside of Airbnbs and hotels that seem to have no other guests. These videos can seem so desolate and quiet that they already feel unnatural, the AI only amplifies that effect.
To see more, I dove into the catalog of director Klipp Ai, where all of the videos were in the same style—AI versions of random rappers from random cities flexing money and shooting guns and dancing with girls and going to the club—but none of them were nearly as twisted, just an automated formula. (I had no idea if Klipp Ai was even a real person until we had a cryptic DM exchange: “I wanna remain faceless but we have meet [sic]on another occasion,” they told me.)
Up until I watched “Transported,” AI in any element of rap visuals—videos, cover art, show flyers, etc.—was an uncomplicated issue for me: It was undeniably bad, probably evil. But the moment I found merit in one video, the holes in my moral stance were exposed. Questions I never thought to ask myself began to rattle around my head: Is there ever an excuse for AI art? Are all uses of AI equal? Am I more concerned with AI art itself or being morally implicated in a technological shift I didn’t ask for?
