The road to A$AP Rocky's Don't Be Dumb was long and bumpy, and that's continuing with the rollout for a presumed deluxe edition.
Way back in 2021, Rocky previewed a song called "Mushroom Clouds." On Oct. 19, that song re-emerged as "Shroom Clouds," a new single with reggie and Jeremih expected to appear on an upcoming deluxe edition of Don't Be Dumb. A police car in the "Shroom Clouds" video says "30 Oct 2026," so fans think Disc 2 will drop this Friday.
Directed by Rocky plus Aisultan Seitov and Pietro Biz Biasia, "Shroom Clouds" is a surreal video with various callbacks to Rocky's story, like a mural of A$AP Yams and a “Purple Swag” callback. It also uses some AI effects, and now it's being accused of using AI to rip off a small creator. Specifically, fans are flagging the psychedelic tunnel imagery at the 2m25s mark, suggesting Rocky fed someone else's work into AI and inserted himself:
Rocky is accused of ripping off a visual from a 2019 video series using GoPro Fusion directed by Ari Fararooy and Cache Bunny, with visual effects by Cache Bunny, featuring German parkour athlete Jason Paul. It does look remarkably similar, and Fararooy's original Instagram post now has a lot of comments tagging Rocky.
Cache Bunny brought the similarity to light in a series of Instagram Stories over the weekend. "They took our video without permission (or even asking), then fed it into AI and changed Jason to ASAP Rocky," he wrote. "They left our original grass and shadow intact, so this is indisputably stolen ?." After pointing out some more specifics about the alleged thievery, Cache Bunny shared this message:
I've gotten over 600 messages about this so far. I don't know what to do about it yet, but clearly this has struck a major chord with the creator community, which is nice to see. Stealing artists work is not ok, and that's not the precedent we want to set. I can't understand why they didn't just reach out to license the clip, or make their own version inspired by it.
If anyone has advice on what to do please let me know ?
Among the long list of people in the YouTube credits are "AI Artist: Spike and Red" and "AI Artist: Ces," so AI was apparently used in some respect. Fans on Rocky's subreddit already disliked the AI effects before Rocky was accused of theft. Now they are extra disappointed.
A few days before the "Shroom Clouds" video dropped, Rocky shared his thoughts on AI in music in an interview with Complex:
It depends. I feel like when guys like Flexin’ Phoenix [Fenix Flexin], whatever his name is, and Tyga — I don’t know their process of how they make it, but I know when they made it, they caught a lot of backlash and shit like that.
Me, personally, I prefer to do things myself, practically. Say if there's a song that's already out from, say, Kanye [West’s] Graduation. Let's say “Good Morning,” you want to take Kanye's lyrics off, but you want the instrumental, not that you can't just find the instrumental online, but say it was hard to find the instrumental, what you could easily do is use AI to split the stems and take away his vocals so that you could actually rap on it.
AI has a lot of negative connotations. I don't think when it's used in certain ways that it's necessarily a right or wrong thing.
AI is supposed to be a tool in that sense. If somebody does a totally AI-generated song where all they did was prompt something, then I think that that's their thing. But who am I to say what's standard and what's not?
I'm just doing me out here and I'm doing my music practically — the right way. I'm really tapping with musicians, producers, beat makers, just to convey my sound and develop my sound.
Check out Cache Bunny's IG stories below. And kids, if you're thinking about using AI to generate any part of your music video, don't be dumb.