Tyga has now said he used AI on $TARFACE, a shift from his earlier claim that the album was built with old hardware and 1980s-era tools. In a follow-up explanation, he said, “For sure,” when asked whether AI was used on the record.
That answer matters because $TARFACE had already drawn derisive accusations of blatant AI usage soon after the public learned it existed. Tyga had initially told People that “even down to the mixing” a lot of the work relied on old hardware, including “delays, harmonizers,” and that “everything that we used was stuff that they used in the ’80s.”
The project is part of a broader effort by Tyga to recast himself through a new character and a concept album, not just another release under his own name. It also arrived in the shadow of Lil Wayne’s Rebirth, a reminder that pop-rap reinventions can pull sharp reactions when they try to bend a rapper’s image into something stranger.
Tyga did not leave the discussion there. He said, “there’s nothing wrong with using technology as a tool,” and added that “the writing, all the vocals are all me.” That leaves the central question less about whether AI touched the record at all and more about what, exactly, it handled. By his own account, the songcraft and performances were his; the technology was part of the process, not the performer.
That distinction is where the friction sits. If the vocals and writing were his, then the AI claim does not mean the album was generated from scratch by a machine. It means Tyga is drawing a line between authorship and assistance, while the reaction around $TARFACE suggests many listeners heard the project as something closer to a machine-made stunt. He compared the blowback to the early days of Auto-Tune, asking, “Why are people overexplaining how they make shit good?”
The unanswered piece is still the simplest one: which parts of $TARFACE came from AI and which parts came from Tyga’s own hands. For now, he has acknowledged the tool, defended the process and insisted the writing and vocals were his, but he has not mapped the line between the two.
