Beanie Sigel is exploring the use of AI to bring back the gruff vocal tone that he lost when he was shot and almost killed back in 2014.
On Tuesday (July 18), the Philly MC stopped by the DJUTV podcast where he revealed he’d been working on a new project — and that he’d be deploying the controversial new technology to help him finish it.
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“I’ve got a new project coming soon,” he revealed. “And I think I found a good friend with this AI thing. Yeah. A lot of people frown on AI, but I think that’s gonna work for me.”
He continued: “It’s definitely for me. Y’all want, what they say, the ‘old Beans’ back? ‘Cause the pen’s still there.”
Back in April, Beanie Sigel opened up about the gory 2014 shooting that nearly cost him his life — and forever altered his voice. Though initially thought to be a deliberate hit on the rapper’s life, VladTV revealed that it was a “wrong place, wrong time” situation, which provided a springboard for Beans to go into details about the incident.
“I got shot in my back,” he began, after elaborating that an ambulance took him to the hospital. “I got shot twice in my back. It came out my stomach.”
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“I was in a coma,” he continued. “So when I was coming out of it I had a breathing tube down my throat. So when I first woke up out the coma, I didn’t know where I was at. And I pulled the breathing tube out. So it tore up shit in my throat. And I had staples in my stomach. So when I was yanking — I couldn’t get it out. It made me gag, and I bust all the staples in my stomach. It just opened up.”
While Beans likes the idea of Artificial Intelligence, the likes of Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, and will.i.am have all spoken out against the technology in recent months.
But one of the most vociferous opponents of the technology is longtime Beans collaborator, Young Guru. After a fake Kendrick Lamar song surfaced online in February, Gu explained why he was so against it.
“This has dominated my Howard group chat for a couple days. Ok I’m at the point where I can voice my concerns with our current state of AI,” he wrote on Instagram. “I have followed as many versions of what AI could do for some years now.
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“I remember being at MIT and students showing me a project where they were actively feeding a computer ‘All’ the jazz records that ever existed. So that AI could analyze and create music in any style of any musician.”
He continued: “I didn’t think we would get here this fast with the voice. Of course my mind goes to the ethical and legal aspects of what can be done with programs like Tacotron 2. You add that to the power of ChatGPT and you realize we are in a very groundbreaking but dangerous moment. It’s not the tech, it’s the evil that men do with the tech.”
