Tyga has accused Doja Cat of making a “demonic album” after she called him “a penis” for releasing his critically derided AI-generated album, Starface.
In an interview with TMZ, the 36-year-old “Rack City” rapper spoke about the backlash to his new album, a synth-pop record that evidently used artificial intelligence technology. When shown the clip of Doja calling him out for the AI record, which comes off the heels of Fenix Flexin’s similarly ‘80s-inspired AI viral hit “Rubberz,” Tyga laughed off his former collaborator’s criticism.
“Listen, I love Doja, but she made a demonic album,” he responded, without elaborating further on which of Doja’s projects he considered “demonic.” Despite her comments, he added, “But I still love her.”
Doja, who previously made her stance on generative AI quite clear, called Tyga out during a recent livestream. “Nobody asked me anything about Tyga, but I just felt like saying this,” the Vie artist said, as seen in the clip below. “Tyga is a penis for making an AI album.”
Elsewhere in the interview with TMZ, Tyga addressed the savage 0.0 review he received from writer Drew Millard for Pitchfork. “Listen, I don’t really know what Pitchfork is, all I know is the devil uses a Pitchfork,” he responded. The review, which is Pitchfork’s first 0.0 in almost two decades, described the album as a “piece of shit” that is “smug and complacent.”
Tyga also reiterated his claim that he only used “AI-assisted things” for the production, but he wrote all the songs and the vocals are his. “When it came to the ‘80s synths and some of the guitar solos, yes I used AI for that, but I didn’t make a full AI album,” he said. “I was in the studio for three months working on this. … It’s really not my fight, I’m just telling people because I like to be honest with the listeners. … I wrote the songs and those are my vocals.”
It’s difficult to determine whether Tyga is telling the truth regarding the songwriting and vocals on the record, but the credits on Tidal show that he’s listed as the composer on all of the tracks alongside producers James Alexander Hau and Nicholas Matthew Balding. How much impact they had on the actual tracks is frustratingly obtuse, because for all we know they could have just written detailed AI prompts into software and tidied it up in a digital audio workstation (DAW).
What doesn’t help the matter is that Tyga’s story about the album keeps changing. He previously implied to People that it was "100 percent human-made," and cited period-accurate gear in the creation of the record. But then he told VIBE, in an interview just one week later, that he “definitely used AI as a tool” when making it. “I know people are going to be mad about me saying this, but it's where technology is going. It's no different than when Auto-Tune came out,” he said.
Regardless of how much AI Tyga didn’t or did use on the album, it sure seems like an incorrigible, putrid cyst of a project that was cynically born from a desire to capitalize on the success of Fenix Flexin’s “Rubberz.”
