When Does Using AI Make You a Musician? Fenix Flexin, Tyga, and the Line Nobody Can Agree On
- David Borish
- 9 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Fenix Flexin's "Rubberz" climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 after it dropped in June 2026. Listeners noticed the vocals ranged higher than anything Flexin had recorded before, delivered in a British accent over an 80s synth-pop arrangement he had never attempted. Producer and DJ Medasin posted a breakdown in late July arguing the track was made with an AI app called Treblo, formerly branded Sonauto. Days later, Treblo's own vetting system confirmed the app had generated the song. Flexin, who had spent weeks sidestepping the question in interviews, responded on Instagram that he had never denied using AI, only that it had nothing to do with his recording process.
Tyga's version of the same story played out almost in parallel. His ninth album, $TARFACE, released July 31 under an 80s-inspired alter ego, drew comparisons to Flexin's track after footage surfaced of the two recording together in the studio. Tyga told Vibe that AI shaped the album's synths and a guitar solo, while the writing and vocals were his own. Pitchfork's August 12 review gave the album a 0.0, its lowest score in nineteen years, arguing the AI-driven production produced an album critic Alphonse Pierre called smug and hollow. Doja Cat weighed in unprompted on a livestream two days later, calling Tyga a crude name for the decision. Tyga's response leaned on comparison rather than denial: people once distrusted Auto-Tune the same way, he argued, and artists who refuse new tools get left behind.
How Suno and Udio Ended Up Writing the Rules
Both controversies surfaced against a legal backdrop that has been building since June 2024, when the RIAA filed copyright suits on behalf of Sony, Universal, and Warner against Suno and Udio, the two AI platforms most responsible for making studio-quality generated tracks accessible to anyone with a text prompt. Both companies initially argued fair use covered their training data, then effectively conceded in court filings that their models were trained on copyrighted recordings.
The labels have since split. Warner settled with Suno in November 2025, a deal that included Suno acquiring Warner's concert-data platform Songkick and a commitment to launch licensed models with artist opt-in over voice and likeness. Universal settled with Udio the previous month, establishing a per-generation licensing structure that reportedly became the pricing reference other labels now negotiate against. Sony has settled with neither company and continues litigating in Boston against Suno and in New York against Udio, with discovery in the Udio case running through late August 2026. In May, Sony and Universal moved to expand their Suno case from 560 tracks to more than 61,000, a change that could push potential statutory damages past nine billion dollars.
Udio's product changed shape as a condition of settling. It now operates as what industry coverage describes as a closed system where users can prompt and remix licensed catalog material but cannot export or download raw output, a structural concession that ties the platform's commercial future to the labels it once trained on without permission.
Where the Labels Actually Drew the Line
On July 30, a coalition of eleven companies, including Sony, Universal, Warner, Believe, BMG, Concord, HYBE, and others, proposed unified principles for when AI-assisted recordings can qualify for official charts. IFPI adopted the framework days later across the charts it directly manages, with plans to extend it through more than twenty official chart programs worldwide.
The standard rests on three conditions: the AI service used must be lawful and properly authorized, the recording must be substantially created by humans, and the track must not involve stream or chart manipulation. IFPI chief executive Victoria Oakley framed the goal as keeping charts an authentic measure of human artistry while still allowing licensed AI tools into the creative process.
What the framework does not do is name which platforms qualify as authorized. Warner has licensed Suno. Universal and Warner have licensed Udio. Sony is suing both. No chart body or distributor has published a list of approved services, which leaves a track like "Rubberz," made on an app with no licensing relationship to any major label, in a gray zone the new rules were ostensibly built to resolve. Distributor TuneCore, owned by coalition member Believe, has already begun blocking distribution from unlicensed AI generation apps as of April 2026, and Deezer reports that 44 percent of new daily uploads to its platform are now AI-generated, detected through a proprietary spectral-artifact system the company says reaches 99.8 percent accuracy, a figure Deezer has not had independently audited.
The Precedent Nobody's Citing
Two years before Rubberz and $TARFACE, comedian Willonius Hatcher, known as King Willonius, wrote comedic lyrics mocking Drake during the Kendrick Lamar feud and ran them through Udio, generating more than a hundred versions across genres including gospel, yacht rock, and K-pop before settling on the soul arrangement that became "BBL Drizzy." Metro Boomin sampled it. Drake's own team then licensed the track for Drake's response song "U My Everything," making it, according to industry coverage, the first AI-generated work officially sampled and licensed by a major artist.
Hatcher has been explicit about what the process involved. Speaking to Vulture, he credited himself with the songwriting, punchlines like "thicker than a Snicker" that he says no model could generate on its own. He told The Grain that the discipline came first, with AI serving as an amplifier for skills he had already built. That distinction, between iterating toward a specific creative result and accepting whatever the first generation returns, is the one now sitting at the center of the Flexin and Tyga controversies, except in reverse. Willonius built years of writing practice before AI tools existed to accelerate it. The current controversy is over artists whose critics argue the tool did the building.
Prompting Versus Producing
The recurring defense from artists caught using AI, Tyga's Auto-Tune comparison, producer Purp On The Beat's argument that Auto-Tune is itself a form of AI, Empire of the Sun's Luke Steele calling generative tools "just another tool" akin to a smart guitar pedal, rests on treating AI as one more piece of studio equipment. That comparison holds up in direct proportion to how much shaping happens after the tool runs. An artist who generates a stem, replaces it, rewrites the lyrics the model produced, and rerecords vocals over the result is doing something recognizably similar to sampling or using a drum machine: the AI output becomes raw material for a human decision-making process, an actual production partner. Willonius's hundred-plus iterations before landing on a final arrangement is a version of that same workflow, credited to a comedian who wrote the words the algorithm eventually sang.
The distinction gets harder to sustain when a platform's own detection tooling identifies a released commercial track as its output, as happened with Rubberz, or when an artist's public account of the process keeps changing under pressure. Tyga's insistence that the writing and vocals are entirely his remains, for now, an unverified claim rather than a documented workflow, the same category Fenix Flexin's account occupied for months before Treblo's confirmation forced a different story. The IFPI framework's requirement that a recording be "substantially created by humans" gestures at this same line without defining where prompting ends and production begins, an ambiguity that will likely get tested the next time a charting single draws the same scrutiny "Rubberz" did.
What Comes Next
Sony's litigation against Suno and Udio remains the case most likely to set a binding legal standard for whether training AI models on copyrighted recordings without a license constitutes fair use, with document discovery in the Udio case running through August 25 and no trial date yet set in the Suno matter. Until a ruling or a settlement resolves that question, the chart-eligibility framework the labels built in July functions as an industry standard without legal teeth behind the word "authorized." Artists, meanwhile, are left drawing their own lines in public, sometimes changing their story more than once before landing on one they're willing to defend.
David Borish is a journalist and analyst covering frontier AI, enterprise technology, and emerging science, and the author of the forthcoming book The Tony Hawk Paradox. More at davidborish.com.
