Normally I don't care enough about timeless or Carti to defend them from slander or anything but I've seen so many narratives and misinformation that it's important to lay out the facts. You can come to your own conclusions from there. Will try to be as unbiased as possible, anything else devolves into "lol coping", "do you have ears" etc.

For people who still aren't aware, many people believe that Carti's verse on Timeless is AI in some form.

1. Real Music/Bitch You're Blocked

Will be calling it real music for the sake of brevity.

• It was leaked via groupbuy on October 11 2024, 2 weeks after the release of timeless
• Produced by Ojivolta
• The vocals are performed by Lawson with an AI filter to make it sound like Carti's voice, confirmed recently by Lawson posting the unfiltered version. Speculated that this was done to serve as a reference track/demo for Carti.

How it relates to timeless:

• "Carti" uses 2 different voices in real music just like in timeless, the voices sound very similar to the ones in timeless as well (baby voice and talking voice).
• Lawson and Ojivolta both worked on Timeless.

This directly links Carti/Timeless to AI but could still be explained by the voices being trained from Timeless, not the other way around. Real music by itself is not why people think timeless is AI.

2. The Timeless demo

A demo version of Timeless also leaked different than the original release with extensions to Carti's verse and more adlibs, a similar version was played live by F1lthy. Some people claim this is AI but not the release version.

If you ask me Carti sounds basically the same here, maybe with some different autotune settings as the autotune pitch shifts are more noticeable in this version.

The Weeknd's part is much more different however and there are very apparent vocal glitches, especially the part where he says "ever since I was a jit know I was the shit". He also sings the word "timeless" with a different pronunciation than he normally would and does in the release. It's not a stretch to say that this part is AI and originally performed by Lawson. Note that weeknd's verse in the release isn't considered AI.

3. Timeless release

There are no vocal glitches in Carti's verse as prevalent as Weeknd's verse in the demo, but the pronunciation of some words do not match the lyrics (ignoring minor differences like "knew" as "know").

• "22 clips" pronounced as "22 tricks/trips"
• "ready to lick" pronounced as "feady to lick"
• "smile on my face, ain't playing shit" - "playing" pronounced as "faying"?
• "wrestling all of my demons" - "demons" sounds like "doins"

AI distorts words like this all the time, but people also argue that Carti often mispronounces words in his songs for musical effect. He could also just be fucking up the words. Personally I can't say for sure whether a human made those sounds or not, especially with the amount of postprocessing on it. But it might be very clear to you.

Some additional info that may or may not be relevant:

• There is a behind the scenes video of Mike Dean and Carti in the studio listening to the Timeless beat
• Carti has performed the song live including the São Paulo performance before its release where he knew the words and even adds a "feel like the rock" adlib as in the extended demo version

This could mean that Carti did record a verse but that doesn't mean it was used in the final version.

4. Personal incentives

This is what people fall back to when just talking about how the verse sounds isn't convincing enough. There are many reasons people think Carti or others involved may or may not want to use AI.

• Kanye has extensively used AI in music and is a big influence for Carti and has worked with Ojivolta
• Mike Dean and the Weeknd have a song called "Artificial Intelligence" where the Weeknd talks about AI trying to take his soul
• Some people think Timeless was a test run to see how much the general audience is receptive to AI vocals
• Carti is lazy

Conclusion

I think you could easily convince yourself either way that Timeless is AI or not. In the future it may be straight up impossible to tell apart an AI filter from the original voice, we just happen to have more context here.

I don't like Timeless enough to have an opinion, but artists should only receive credit for verses they actually did. I do think Lawson killed it on Real Music, he deserves to work with Ojivolta and other high profile producers outside of reference tracks and AI. Whoever is on Lose You killed it too. (Probably Carti except maybe "it wasn't you it was me" part)

Carti is also too talented to have ghost vocalists. I would think he believes this too but maybe he's insecure idk. Or he didn't have a say in it at all. In any case, either credit Lawson or get Carti to try