[HOST] Artificial intelligence is all around us - from the phones we carry to the algorithms
that serve us the music that we listen to. It’s literally used in everything.
But over the last few years and in particularly the last few months, A.I has been used to
actual rap songs and in instance, actual rappers.
And it forced me to ask the question - is it just A.I, or is it a band of people coming
together to masquerading as A.I?
A.I’s use in creating music has been widely
documented - OpenAi, an A.I research company released a slew of music in 2020 in the ethos
of popular musicians like Katy Perry and singer Holly Herndon uses A.I as an assistant to
create pop music. But like I said before, what about actual rap songs? Well yea that’s
happened too - enter Travis Bott.
Ned: We didn’t expect it- It was more of an internal experiment on ours that we kinda
went all-in on, and we didn't expect it to garner such a feverish response literally
around the world... HOST: That’s Ned Lampert and Micah Kulish
from Space150 - the company behind Travis Bott. Genius spoke with them to find out how
they created a robot version of Travis Scott - that wasn’t in Fortnite.
This made waves when it dropped last year - it was obviously fake but some of the lyrics
sounded like they’re straight from the mind of La Flame.
According to Ned and Micah, they fed a computer hundreds of Travis Scott songs which then
spat out lyrics - they sent me a doc with them and they’re pretty...unusual.
Check out these bars.
Because like you just heard, most of it didn’t make any sense, a human hand was needed to
actually craft the songs to make them palatable...so they didn’t go full Matrix on ya.
Then they had Dallas rapper So-So Topic “become” Travis and rap the songs. In a tweet last
year he said quote. it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever been
a part of. This entire endeavor raised some serious ethical
questions and the aforementioned Holly Herndon critiquing them in an interview saying quote.
Space150 maintains that they were trying to
make any money with TravisBott and that they were just trying to start a conversation.
Buuut not everyone is in this A.I rapper game for the LULs or even altruistic reasons. Some
people are actually here to make money. Enter FN Meka.
FN Meka is a virtual human influencer with
more than 9 million followers on Tik Tok. Its greatest hits include an Airpod Shotgun,
selling a toilet as an NFT and many others.
In 2019 it released two songs - “Internet”...
And “Moonwalking.”
The tracks were clearly chasing the ethos of embattled artists 6ix9ine and Tay-K in
“Moonwalking” and on “Internet” respectively.
These cuts were synced to TikToks in an effort to go viral. But it was its branding of ‘the
first “Robot Rapper'' that really made me ask questions.
Who was the voice behind FN Meka? Who are the people controlling FN Meka? Why are they
masquerading behind this avatar? Why won’t they just be transparent?
It’s most recent effort is “Speed Demon,” which is made entirely by A.I...which is clear
judging by the unintelligible lyrics.
Ant: So Speed Demon was our first real foray into AI music creation.
HOST: In my mission to find Meka’s true creators, I landed on Anthony Martini, he’s
part of For Factory New - Meka’s record label. Him and I spoke on a few occasions
about Fn Meka.
At first, he wanted me to treat FN Meka as if it were a real living breathing robot.
Ant: right now all of these worlds are sort of separated. You have the virtual world,
you have video game world, you have human world, all that. At some point, it's all going
to be blurred anyway. HOST: He even had me speak with someone supposedly
was ‘FN Meka.’ ‘FN Meka: To be honest, I had no idea why I was created by Factory New and
I was coded with a hard set of beliefs to just rap.
HOST: For the entire conversation, this person
never left character. FN Meka: ...rap purely based on statistics.
The AI scans what's currently popular and we try and mimic music that's popular in the
current culture. HOST: The whole thing felt weird- and they
still were being cagey as to who created FN Meka… and why?
After reading hundreds of comments on Meka’s videos, one name continually popped up - Chris
Le AKA ClegFX.
Le is a triple threat - vlogger, designer, music video director and much more. He’s
the co-founder of RTFKT studios where they create and sell Sneaker NFTs and other collectibles.
He’s involved in the creation of Meka’s record label, Factory New.
He hails from Salt Lake City, Utah - the same location where FN Meka claims as it’s home
base on Virtual Human Database.
Here Le is seen in April 2019 announcing FN Meka as an early signee of Factory New.
Genius reached out to Chris numerous times to get him on the record for this interview
but he declined comment - but he did issue one statement it said quote.
Thanks for your interest. I only sponsor fnmeka with my NFT brand, RTFKT Studios.
Which was true - but the evidence suggests way more. I went back to the aforementioned
post and I kept looking through comments. And one of them blew the whole story wide
open.
In it he responds to a commenter asking a question about FN Meka by saying quote.
he’s created in my brother’s Lab Chris Le’s brother’s name is Brandon and
he also goes by GunJunkie.
In the early 2010’s he made skins for DOTA and the video game CS:GO.
Brandon is also moderator of a Steam group called “Factory New.”
A source on background confirmed to me that Brandon is behind the design of FN Meka with
Chris Le as the brains.
Meka’s two songs dropped in the months after the announcement with TikTok videos pushing
each.
I thought back to my interview with “Meka” or whomever was claiming to be Meka. I asked
if it believed that one day Robot rappers or musicians will overtake human musicians
and become our musical overlords. And it’s answers were...peculiar to say the least.
FN Meka - Yes. Because humans are very limited in their dictionary. But once even neural net comes or just AI in general, I think robots
and humans are going to get smarter overall.
HOST: So clearly I needed to take a step back to figure out exactly what I was dealing with
- What is a “virtual human,” anyway? Dudley: So a virtual human is obviously a
synthetic version of a human created through CGI, it can be a static character that you
look at on a screen or it can be a character that talks to you in some way or is in some
form of video, but it's synthetic, it's computer generated imagery.
HOST: That’s Dudley Nevill-Spencer of the Virtual Influencer Agency. He works with brands
to craft virtual humans and is currently involved in creating a code of ethics for brands who
manage these characters.
Dudley thinks FN Meka is actually pretty good design.
Dudley: It's the CGI which makes it, creating the AirPod rifle and all that kind of stuff,
that's very clever because that's new. That's interesting
Host: But he also believes it’s important for the human’s behind these avatars to
be public. Dudley: It's really important if it's an avatar
of a real human, you need to know who that human is because if you have avatars of 50
year old men pretending to be 12 year old girls, that's a big problem.
Host: And studies show that people actually believe these robots are real people.
But he sees the utility in using Mekas as a vessel to create and sell music.
Dudley: the music almost becomes, "Oh, well, I'm going to watch it because I'm actually
being entertained...Do I think it's that good? It's probably better than any other robot's
music I've heard but I don't necessarily think it's going to change the world yet,
HOST: Armed with this knowledge, I linked
up with Ant from Factory New once more.
Anthony:...like I mentioned before, it's not like it's a top secret thing where... you
know. If you do enough searching, you'll know who's behind it.
HOST: I asked him if he could confirm that Meka’s creator was Brandon Le.
ANTHONY: I mean, I can't confirm or deny. I've always wanted to say that in an interview...
Host: In a statement Anthony provided me on behalf of FactoryNew from Brandon Le after
that interview, Brandon confirmed that he is in fact the creator of FN Meka. He said
quote. FNMeka was originally a concept character
for a Video Game Project called "Clout Fighter"... It is essentially a video game where SoundCloud
Rappers fight each other, which is similar to one of my favorite games ever: Def Jam
Vendetta. The statement went on to say that Meka’s
design is a combination of quote, “ ICY Narco, Lil Pump, Trippie Redd and Tekashi
6ix9ine.
As for the secrecy? Le said quote. The people behind FNMeka wish to stay somewhat
behind the scenes because Meka receives a lot of hate mail, death threats, etc
As for the voice behind Meka’s two earliest songs, Le says it was Kyle the Hooligan.
Genius made contact with Kyle but he did not answer any questions as to the involvement
of FN Meka.. Anthony says Meka is just one piece in a wider
roll out for Factory New. Anthony: FN characters are going to be the
internal, "Marvel Universe" model, where it's anything that's FN will be created from scratch
in-house and built up and those are more like part of Factory New specifically.
HOST: In fact, FN Meka is already fighting with a new character called “FN Nxrmal.”
A robot beef of some sorts.
And the top comment on the YouTube post says, quote.
Does Meka dream of electric sheep? We’ll
never know. I’m Jacques Morel with Genius News, bringing
you the meaning and the knowledge behind the music. Peace!