Tyga said he used AI on $TARFACE after first telling People the record was built with old 1980s hardware. A week later, he told VIBE, “For sure,” when asked if AI was part of the album. That reversal puts the project’s creation process at the center of the release, not just its Scarface-inspired concept.
People and VIBE
Tyga first framed the album around hardware, saying, “Even down to the mixing, we used a lot of the old hardware,” and pointing to “delays, harmonizers.” He added, “Everything that we used was stuff that they used in the ’80s.”
Then came the sharper answer: “For sure.” Tyga paired that with a defense that “there’s nothing wrong with using technology as a tool,” while saying “the writing, all the vocals are all me.” That matters because the dispute is not over whether the record involved technology; it is over how much of the sound listeners should hear as machine-assisted versus performed.
$TARFACE and Rubberz
$TARFACE immediately drew accusations of blatant AI use, which makes Tyga’s change in explanation more than a casual clarification. The project arrives as part of a broader argument inside music about where production tools end and authorship begins, and Tyga himself tied the backlash to the way people once reacted to Auto-Tune.
The comparison is blunt. Tyga said public criticism of AI tools resembles the early response to Auto-Tune, and that stance places him in the middle of a debate music keeps replaying whenever a new tool becomes easy to hear. The record’s presentation may be built around a reinvention concept, but the real story is the gap between the first explanation and the later admission.
Tyga’s next explanation
Tyga has now said enough to establish that AI was involved on $TARFACE, but not enough to map which parts were generated, assisted, or cleaned up in the process. That leaves listeners with the same practical question the controversy opened with: what, exactly, on the record was his and what came from the tool he says he used.
