A$AP Rocky says AI is a tool for pulling Kanye's vocals off 'Good Morning', and a prompt-only song is 'their thing'

A$AP Rocky’s answer to the AI question starts with “It depends.”

He gave it to Antonio Johri over Zoom for a Complex interview published on October 14, 2026, fresh off the 49-date world tour for his No. 1 album Don’t Be Dumb. Rocky sees AI as a tool for a technical job, like splitting the stems of Kanye West’s “Good Morning” to get the instrumental.

And a song someone made from a prompt alone? “That’s their thing.”

Rocky is promoting Disc 2 of Don’t Be Dumb right now, and Complex reported he’s dropping a new song and video, “Shroom Clouds”, on Friday, October 16.

What did A$AP Rocky say about AI in music?

“Me, personally, I prefer to do things myself, practically,” Rocky told Complex.

Then he gave his example. Take a song that’s already out, like “Good Morning” from Kanye’s Graduation, and say the instrumental is hard to find. “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,” he said.

“AI has a lot of negative connotations,” he added. “I don’t think when it’s used in certain ways that it’s necessarily a right or wrong thing.”

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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.

He followed it with a question: “But who am I to say what’s standard and what’s not?” His own music, he said, gets made with people: “I’m really tapping with musicians, producers, beat makers, just to convey my sound and develop my sound.”

Why Tyga and Fenix Flexin came up in A$AP Rocky’s AI answer

Rocky opened his answer with 2 rappers who got caught up in the AI debate this year, and he got one name wrong on the way (“Flexin’ Phoenix [Fenix Flexin], whatever his name is”).

Fenix Flexin’s “Rubberz” peaked at No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100, and on August 7, 2026 he admitted he’d used the AI platform Treblo on it. In August, Tyga confirmed he used Suno on $TARFACE for ’80s synths and a guitar solo.

Rocky didn’t pile on. “I don’t know their process of how they make it, but I know when they made it, they caught a lot of backlash,” he said.

His own work got the AI question too. When fans asked whether his “Helicopter$” video, out January 12, 2026, was AI-generated, he posted “THIS VIDEO IS NOT Ai GENERATED!” on X and added “JUST GENERATIONAL,” Billboard Canada reported.

So what does his “Good Morning” example look like when you try it yourself?

How artists use AI stem separation to take the vocals off a finished song

AI stem separation takes a finished song and pulls it apart into stems, the separate parts of a mix like the vocal, the drums and the bass. Mute the vocal stem and you’re left with the beat. That’s the exact job Rocky described.

It’s also the easiest job you can give one. On MVSEP’s public leaderboard, the best public model scores 18.6 dB on instrumentals against 12.3 dB on vocals (higher means cleaner), and every one of the 7 tools in my stem splitter roundup makes a usable karaoke track or remix bed.

So pick on workflow. For instrumentals, my top pick in that roundup is Ultimate Vocal Remover, which is free and runs on your own computer. If you’d rather stay in the browser, SoundBoost and BandLab both split for free.

One thing the split doesn’t change is who owns the song. A stem pulled from someone else’s record is still a copy of their record, as I explain in my stems cheatsheet.

Rapping over the “Good Morning” instrumental at home needs no clearance. Releasing that rap needs the same clearance you’d need for the original song.