GoKawiilis the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.
Fenix Flexin is best known as a member of Shoreline Mafia, a rap duo from Los Angeles. But he’s recently found solo success with the track “Rubberz,” which has climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100. Almost immediately, though, questions were raised about the song’s origins, with many speculating that it was largely, if not entirely, generated by AI. Fenix has denied those accusations, but done little to dispel them.
Part of the suspicion is certainly due to the fact that the song is a dramatic left turn. Fenix has primarily trafficked in trap-influenced West Coast rap. “Rubberz,” on the other hand, is heavily influenced by ‘80s UK synth pop. The vocal melody is clearly influenced by Morrissey, with Fenix even adopting a fake British accent. But artists are allowed to evolve and experiment. That alone doesn’t prove anything.
Perhaps more telling is the simple quality of the recording. Close inspection reveals a number of artifacts and anomalies that are commonly found in AI-generated music. Hi-hats have a certain brittle quality, the chorus vocals sound like a low-bitrate MP3, and reverb tails haphazardly cut off.
Speaking with The Verge, songwriter and co-host of the Switched on Pop podcast, Charlie Harding, highlighted the giveaways. “Ghostly backing vocals duck in and out unexpectedly. The drum reverb is full of unnatural digital artifacting reminiscent of a 64kbps MP3 downloaded off of Napster. Because most generative AI companies have trained their model on low-quality MP3s of unlicensed copyrighted material, we hear audibly degraded instrumentation.”
Feeding the song into an AI music detector doesn’t deliver a smoking gun. I ran the track through five different tools, and they all said that there was between 20 and 30 percent chance that it was AI or at least AI-assisted. But those sorts of tools are not necessarily super reliable and advance much more slowly than music-making models themselves.
Some of the supporting materials, however, have tripped up AI detectors. The single’s cover art and a post celebrating its success were both flagged as being AI-generated with over 97 percent certainty by multiple AI image detectors. Similarly, I fed the lyrics into multiple AI writing detectors and Gemini, which agreed they appeared to be written by AI. Producer and YouTuber Curtiss King dropped the lyrics into Claude, and it also flagged multiple signs that the lyrics appeared to be AI-generated.
The lyrics are the sort of logical near-gibberish that AI often spits out. The rhymes are simple and clean in a way that you wouldn’t expect from someone who is a reasonably accomplished rapper. There are no near rhymes or internal rhymes. Instead, everything sticks to a basic AA, BB format that clearly prioritizes the rhyme scheme over actual meaning or narrative development.
Swipin’ cards and stackin’ chips, I saw you sinkin’ ships Left me standin’ in the pourin’ rain, now I bought a heavy diamond chain
Who is sinking ships? Are we the sinking ships? No clue, this idea never comes back up. Similarly, the individual lines of the chorus might make sense, but when combined are meaningless.
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