Skip to main content

In the hilarious Project Gucciberg, a deepfaked Gucci Mane reads classic novels

 

“Gucci Mane crazy, I might pull up on a zebra/ Land on top a eagle, smoke a joint of reefa.”

Recommended Videos

That’s a Gucci Mane lyric from his 2010 track “It’s Gucci Time” from the album The Appeal: Georgia’s Most Wanted.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged/ that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” That’s also, now, a Gucci bar, albeit one originally written by Jane Austen in her 1813 novel of manners, Pride and Prejudice, although Gucci imbues it with a level of trap rap swagger that doesn’t quite come across in other readings of the classic English text. (By comparison, the top Audible entry for the same novel is read by the decidedly non-trap rap superstar Rosamund Pike.)

Gucci, as it turns out, has been busy — busier even than he was during the 2010-2015 period when he was issuing mixtapes at a dizzying rate of roughly one per month. Today, the 41-year-old rapper debuted voice readings of himself reading an assortment of classic novels under the somewhat brilliant title “Project Gucciberg.” A smattering of the novels include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Little Women, A Modest Proposal, Dracula, and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Only he didn’t. Well, not exactly.

MSCHF

It’s more deepfake audio wizardry, this time courtesy of the folks at New York-based digital arts collective MSCHF. Fresh off their last project — in which they attached a paintball gun to one of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots, and allowed users to remotely control it over the internet — the team has lent their button-pushing, tech-savvy brand of prankster irreverence to a project in which the rapper born Radric Delantic Davis is, himself, remote-controlled (at least, his words are) to narrate a slew of vintage novels.

Evil geniuses

MSCHF’s Daniel Greenberg told Digital Trends: “Gucci Mane is one of the most impactful musicians in the history of rap. Project Gutenberg is one of the last bastions of public domain texts on the internet. By combining the two, using the power of A.I. technology, we have created the most impactful rapper-read public domain audiobooks in the history of the internet.”

To create their (totally unauthorized) literature-loving A.I. rapper, the team crafted a training dataset of around six hours of Gucci’s speech, pulled from interviews, podcasts, and whatever other publicly accessible audio footage they could scavenge from YouTube. This source material was then edited, trimmed down into 10-second segments, EQ’d, transcribed, and labeled.

MSCHF

“Additionally, our team built out a Gucci pronunciation key/dictionary to better capture the idiosyncrasies of Gucci Mane’s particular argot,” Greenberg said. He added, “Seriously, this thing is the equivalent of a linguistics thesis.”

The dataset was then used to train an A.I. model, repeatedly massaged so that it improved the output, and then augmented with human touches to add flair like pregnant pauses into the text where required.

“It may sound like Gucci is speaking into a broken microphone at times, or on a bad audio stream — because he was in a lot of our source material,” Greenberg admitted. “However, barring these environmental factors, we feel the actual voice emulation is extremely successful. It is both amazing and scary how good this technology is to make anyone say whatever you want.”

MSCHF

The real Gucci Mane did not respond to a request for comment. However, this is, as Greenberg acknowledged, something of a “gray area” when it comes to copyright. “The copyright implications of deepfakes have not yet been legislated,” he said. “All of the audio samples we trained our model on were publicly available through interviews. At the end of the day, we have a voice that is not ours, reading public domain text that we didn’t write, but we are creating our ‘own’ audiobooks.”

Deepfake-A-Thon

Last year, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation LLC entertainment agency took issue with an audio deepfaker who used the rapper’s voice to spout gibberish like the Navy Seal Copypasta on YouTube. It was, as I noted at the time, a brain-teasing conundrum for a rapper who once rapped the line “I sampled your voice, you was usin’ it wrong” during his early 2000s beef with Nas. But Roc Nation wasn’t getting into the ironic complexity of the case. They were just annoyed about someone “unlawfully [using] an A.I. to impersonate our client’s voice.”

It’s not difficult to see why an artist might be perturbed by such a thing. Like the visual deepfakes that place actors in movies in which they never appeared (or, as is doing the rounds recently, Tom Cruise in a series of hyperactive TikTok videos), an audio deepfake of an artist takes their most valuable asset — their voice, in this case — and uses it to create something they never consented to perform in. There are both ethical and financial issues at stake.

MSCHF

“The history of rap is the history of self-reference,” Greenberg maintained. “Throughout the entire canon of the tradition, throughout the body of a given performer’s work. When you peek under the hood of an A.I. learning model, there’s an uncannily similar process occurring — a kind of hyper-self-reference. Oblique as it may seem, this all dovetails quite nicely.”

Should we be worried about the risk of audio deepfakes in a world where real and fake can be blurred to a startling degree?

“Absolutely, but alarm won’t stop deepfakes from becoming more and more mainstream,” he said. “This technology is here to stay — we should be so lucky if it’s only ever used for fun. Maybe doing fun things with it will help keep us in that realm. We have reached an inflection point where truth and fiction are becoming impossible to discern on the internet. Thus, we realized it was crucial that we soothe our ears with Gucci Mane’s gentle A.I.-generated reading voice.”

As siren songs to usher us onto the rocks of Skynet go, maybe Gucci isn’t so bad, as it happens. Especially if it could be 2009-era Gucci, circa The State vs. Radric Davis.

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Star Wars legend Ian McDiarmid gets questions about the Emperor’s sex life
Ian McDiarmid as the Emperor in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

This weekend, the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith 20th anniversary re-release had a much stronger performance than expected with $25 million and a second-place finish behind Sinners. Revenge of the Sith was the culmination of plans by Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) that led to the fall of the Jedi and his own ascension to emperor. Because McDiarmid's Emperor died in his first appearance -- 1983's Return of the Jedi -- Revenge of the Sith was supposed to be his live-action swan song. However, Palpatine's return in Star Wars: Episode IX -- The Rise of Skywalker left McDiarmid being asked questions about his character's comeback, particularly about his sex life and how he could have a granddaughter.

While speaking with Variety, McDiarmid noted that fans have asked him "slightly embarrassing questions" about Palpatine including "'Does this evil monster ever have sex?'"

Read more
Waymo and Toyota explore personally owned self-driving cars
Front three quarter view of the 2023 Toyota bZ4X.

Waymo and Toyota have announced they’re exploring a strategic collaboration—and one of the most exciting possibilities on the table is bringing fully-automated driving technology to personally owned vehicles.
Alphabet-owned Waymo has made its name with its robotaxi service, the only one currently operating in the U.S. Its vehicles, including Jaguars and Hyundai Ioniq 5s, have logged tens of millions of autonomous miles on the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin.
But shifting to personally owned self-driving cars is a much more complex challenge.
While safety regulations are expected to loosen under the Trump administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has so far taken a cautious approach to the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles. General Motors-backed Cruise robotaxi was forced to suspend operations in 2023 following a fatal collision.
While the partnership with Toyota is still in the early stages, Waymo says it will initially study how to merge its autonomous systems with the Japanese automaker’s consumer vehicle platforms.
In a recent call with analysts, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai signaled that Waymo is seriously considering expanding beyond ride-hailing fleets and into personal ownership. While nothing is confirmed, the partnership with Toyota adds credibility—and manufacturing muscle—to that vision.
Toyota brings decades of safety innovation to the table, including its widely adopted Toyota Safety Sense technology. Through its software division, Woven by Toyota, the company is also pushing into next-generation vehicle platforms. With Waymo, Toyota is now also looking at how automation can evolve beyond assisted driving and into full autonomy for individual drivers.
This move also turns up the heat on Tesla, which has long promised fully self-driving vehicles for consumers. While Tesla continues to refine its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, it remains supervised and hasn’t yet delivered on full autonomy. CEO Elon Musk is promising to launch some of its first robotaxis in Austin in June.
When it comes to self-driving cars, Waymo and Tesla are taking very different roads. Tesla aims to deliver affordability and scale with its camera, AI-based software. Waymo, by contrast, uses a more expensive technology relying on pre-mapped roads, sensors, cameras, radar and lidar (a laser-light radar), that regulators have been quicker to trust.

Read more
Uber partners with May Mobility to bring thousands of autonomous vehicles to U.S. streets
uber may mobility av rides partnership

The self-driving race is shifting into high gear, and Uber just added more horsepower. In a new multi-year partnership, Uber and autonomous vehicle (AV) company May Mobility will begin rolling out driverless rides in Arlington, Texas by the end of 2025—with thousands more vehicles planned across the U.S. in the coming years.
Uber has already taken serious steps towards making autonomous ride-hailing a mainstream option. The company already works with Waymo, whose robotaxis are live in multiple cities, and now it’s welcoming May Mobility’s hybrid-electric Toyota Sienna vans to its platform. The vehicles will launch with safety drivers at first but are expected to go fully autonomous as deployments mature.
May Mobility isn’t new to this game. Backed by Toyota, BMW, and other major players, it’s been running AV services in geofenced areas since 2021. Its AI-powered Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) tech allows it to react quickly and safely to unpredictable real-world conditions—something that’s helped it earn trust in city partnerships across the U.S. and Japan.
This expansion into ride-hailing is part of a broader industry trend. Waymo, widely seen as the current AV frontrunner, continues scaling its service in cities like Phoenix and Austin. Tesla, meanwhile, is preparing to launch its first robotaxis in Austin this June, with a small fleet of Model Ys powered by its camera-based Full Self-Driving (FSD) system. While Tesla aims for affordability and scale, Waymo and May are focused on safety-first deployments using sensor-rich systems, including lidar—a tech stack regulators have so far favored.
Beyond ride-hailing, the idea of personally owned self-driving cars is also gaining traction. Waymo and Toyota recently announced they’re exploring how to bring full autonomy to private vehicles, a move that could eventually bring robotaxi tech right into your garage.
With big names like Uber, Tesla, Waymo, and now May Mobility in the mix, the ride-hailing industry is evolving fast—and the road ahead looks increasingly driver-optional.

Read more