Kanye West claims forthcoming album will feature “NO AI”

In a 2025 interview with radio host Justin Laboy, West announced he was using artificial intelligence in his music “the same way I incorporated Auto-Tune. It’s a tool, not a replacement.” He then stated, in typically ministerial style, that it was time for him “to explain to people the power of AI in music,” admitting to Laboy that he liked to send songs and samples to his engineer, John Scott, alongside the instruction “AI.” Eagle-eyed viewers noted that, in the video accompanying the interview, West could be seen using Audimee, a platform for AI vocal transformations. Ye and Ty Dolla $ign’s album VULTURES 2, which was called “confused,” “distasteful,” and “deeply unserious” by reviewers, used the technology heavily. 

Ye caught flack in November 2024 for using artificial intelligence to create animated versions of his daughters, North and Chicago West, in the music video for his song “Bomb.” However, in a sign of the times, his recently released Bully V1 video featured real, non-AI footage of his son Saint. Ye associates who previously touted the upcoming album’s lack of AI use have celebrated the claim. Music manager Peter Jideonwo had already stated on X in January that there was “no AI on Bully.” Far-right commentator and Yeezy chum Milo Yiannopoulis, who spends most of his time tweeting antisemitic tirades and joking about murdering fellow bigot Laura Loomer, took a brief break from his habitual vitriol to issue a celebratory statement on the matter. “You may dispatch your letters of apology to the usual address,” he wrote.

Antiwoke compatriots be damned, Bully, the twelfth album in the rapper’s near 25-year career, has seen its auteur through a moral journey of his own: since its September 2024 announcement, West has been accused of sexual battery and sexual assault, self-identified as a “Nazi” and a “racist,” and then reneged on the sobriquets in a full-page Wall Street Journal ad that blamed his virulent comments on a brain injury suffered in the 2003 car crash that inspired his breakout single “Through the Wire.” Ye claimed in the ad that he was “not asking for sympathy, or a free pass,” instead requesting “patience and understanding as I find my way home.” Whether or not the album will ever be released, though, is another question; the release date was initially March 20. When it comes out now is anyone’s guess.