Migos Deepfake Memes Turn Rap Videos Into A.I. Playgrounds

A viral wave of A.I. face-swap videos places users, celebrities, athletes, politicians and pets into performances by the Atlanta rap trio Migos — specifically their 2022 song "Hotel Lobby," filmed for the YouTube series "A Colors Show" against a bright-orange backdrop. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are among those superimposed onto Quavo and Takeoff, and the trend has since spread to Drake's "Burning Bridges" video, with deepfakers inserting the cast of "The Sopranos," the New York Knicks' starting five and A.I. spoofs of Kanye West's Sunday Service choir. The essay argues the memes revive a minstrelsy dynamic, positioning Black performers as templates for comedic fetishization, and echoes TikTok's earlier erasure of cultural lineage in Black-created dances such as the Whoa and the Renegade. It links the trend to transhumanist ambitions voiced by Ray Kurzweil, who told the Guardian in 2024 he planned to upload his mind and resurrect his father as an A.I. avatar, and by Altman, who wrote in 2017 that a human-machine "merge" was underway. Daniel Immerwahr, writing in The New Yorker in 2023, argued doctored videos "rarely deceive," and Adam Schiff's 2019 congressional warning about "nightmarish scenarios" is revisited. Against this, the Atlantic Coast Conference's recent video of college basketball players, including a trio from Virginia Tech, performing the "Hotel Lobby" routine in person is held up as more compelling than any deepfake.