Kanye West
Rapper and Producer
One of the most influential and most controversial figures in modern music, who has folded AI vocals into recent work and puts AI in the “same family” as Auto-Tune — before abruptly disowning AI on his next project.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +3.3proUses AI in their work
- +3.3proHas published AI-made work
- +1.1pro2 pro-AI statements (measured)
- −0.5anti1 anti-AI statement (mild)
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score, with evidence on the other side subtracting: Strongly Pro-AI · 7.2/10
In his words
It’s time for me to explain to people the power of AI in music.
Biography
Kanye West (born 1977, and legally renamed Ye) is a rapper and producer whose albums reshaped hip-hop across two decades. He is also among the most controversial figures in music — his 2022 antisemitic outbursts cost him major partnerships, and in 2025 he released a track built around a Nazi slogan, drawing widespread condemnation.
“The power of AI in music”
West has been a conspicuous adopter of generative AI in the studio. On 2024’s VULTURES 2 (with Ty Dolla $ign) he leaned on AI vocal tools such as Audimee, sending his engineer songs and samples with the single instruction “AI.” In a February 2025 interview with Justin Laboy he demonstrated the workflow on camera and defended it by comparing AI to his early embrace of Auto-Tune — asked whether Auto-Tune had itself been a kind of AI, he agreed it was “in the same family, except that people have a more visceral reaction.”
His enthusiasm proved characteristically mercurial: in March 2026 West announced that his forthcoming album Bully was made without artificial intelligence — an apparent reversal after the heavily AI-assisted VULTURES era. As with much of his public output, the position shifts faster than it can be pinned down.
Quote sources
- The Download with Justin Laboy, 2025(youtube.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/kanye-west
