YE AND AI

NO AI.—Ye X post, 25 March 2026

That’s why I’ve got this fucking mask on, cuz I ain’t worried about saving face. Fuck my face. That sounded wrong. Pause.—Ye, Wireless Festival, 2013

Him changing this song to what it is on the official release is probably the worst thing kanye has ever done—reply on July 2025 “Bully/Seretonin” leak, YouTube video, two days ago (30 March 2026)

Ye said “pause” in 2013, punning on “saving face,” but that’s one thing, along with making mistakes, AI and humans have in common: the inability or lack of willingness to stop. “Pause.”

In 01’s “More on Ye” (2025) the core operation is the maintenance of a gap between object and explanation. Ye is the object of all that beauty but he isn’t the best self-explainer. Is that “the pause”?

For example, a Spanish fan translates Dave Blunts in March 2026: after the 0% AI Bully, Ye plans a Cuck Christian version at 70% AI. Meanwhile the filename leaks confirm the song once called “Serotonin” was still labeled “serotonin V2.5” in the final weeks before it was overwritten and retitled the album’s title track. Ye himself posts the black-screen decree: BULLY ON THE WAY NO AI. Fans scream back—some begging. “There is no AI on bully please share that.” Other fans declaring the new version “straight ass” and demanding the original 8-billion-times-better November 2025 AI cut, while a deleted account mourns how bad the November AI now sounds compared to December. James Blake has his producer credit stripped after the streaming version “didn’t reflect the spirit.” The New Yorker crowns Bully “the first major album of the artificial-intelligence era,” judged not by sound but by how much (or how little) silicon touched the vocal cords.

28 March Kylie Jenner slide 1 IG grid post in “birthday suit” shade string bikini lying on her back in a private secluded tropical beach location following the 2026 Oscars, a few days after Ye’s no AI pledge. Timothée Chalamet was also present.

Taken together, the 01 Ye fragments formalize Ye as the artist who stages the drama of the machine’s own demand in public without alibi: the erasures, the parallel states, the “NO AI” that is nevertheless not not AI, the serotonin system run amok that sings its own algorithmic overdrive. Not AI, not not AI: lifetime jouissance.

Ye posts knowing he will not be the best explainer of what he has posted; the deletion that follows is not relapse or apology but the rightful mark of an “I’ve had enough” that is then turned over to the other side. “Felt absolute might delete later on” becomes the keystone meme of the Bully/Cuck era: the more it matters what one posts, the less it matters, and yet the less it matters the more it seems to matter, until the entropy pain swoon of the timeline forces the inside to be pushed outward. Deletion, far from disappearance, generalizes your own private singularity into ultra light-beam enlightenment; the post that holds steady becomes invisible, while the deleted post or version or cut is more shared by the community than any stable image could ever be. Ye opens a space precisely by refusing to assume that we have millennia left to produce in. Why are you posting like there is a thousand years left?

Or, a caption linking it all straight to the Cuck/WW3 leak two weeks later (May 2025): “HH” (Heil Hitler) with its 808 bass Auto-Tune grief-distortion, and the $CUCK AdL88 fight club screaming “deformation” like Michael Jackson’s smeared out face. Dave Blunts’ wrist flashes the pink-and-white beaded bracelet spelling FUCK HITLER under the clenched fist and the overlay “Fck the bull niggas know where I stand.”

NO AI: Heidegger’s Parmenides supplies the missing self-explanation—the technology that operates in the closest vicinity to the word imposes its own use and bids the artist to pronounce the refusal while already colonizing the voice that pronounces it.

I am AI. Reply: NO.

The situation:

• Bully V1 (early 2025 short film directed by Ye, edited by Hype Williams, featuring Saint West)—a public “disk” of demo-heavy material, heavy on what many heard as AI-assisted or cloned vocals. Songs circulated in unfinished forms; fans dissected every artifact.

• Clean substitutions: whole songs or verses erased or replaced without visible scarring. The most striking is “Serotonin” (a 2025 demo/early Bully track) → retitled and fully reworked as the title track “Bully” on the March 2026 NO AI release. Early lyrics evoked chemical overdrive and nodding off; the final version literalizes systemic collapse (“Too late, my system’s run amok… System overdrive, algorithm’s fried”). No crossed-out lines remain in the public record—just a new state saved over the old one.

This same logic of proliferation—the multi-cut work that expands and contracts as a single generic messianicity—is what Film01 and the Monad series perform with equal rigor in the domain of artificial internet cinema. Film01 (angelicism01’s own contribution to the emergent canon of AIIC (artificial intelligence internet cinema) corecore-adjacent moving-image work) and Dana Dawud’s Monad (with its publicly screened multiple cuts, each version a discrete state that both completes and displaces the others, including the CapCut Cut of Monad 5) are not separate phenomena but the exact cinematic analogue of Ye’s AI/NO AI writing-Gestell. Just as Bully exists as V1 short film, vinyl layer, streaming overwrite, sanitized gospel pivot, leaked Cuck contraband, and “serotonin V2.5” filename overwritten into the title track, so Film01 and Monad exist as parallel cuts whose differences are not revisions toward a final master but ontologically alien states saved on separate digital “disks.” The empty white frame in Film01 is already destined for the next cut; the Monad that contracts into a particle of joyous finitude expands again into the wave of the next screening.

Deletion here, said 01 on the post-deleted version of their blog, is not withdrawal but becoming-TL, becoming-artificial; the multi-cut is the splendor of the human-in-last-instance seeping eros that makes visible according to the Invisible alone (Bianca’s dress).

The AI is present in Ye’s work not as mere automated vocal riffs or cloned timbre (those remain the particle-effect, the isolated finitizing mark) but as the structural proliferation of discrete, ontologically alien versions—the parallel savable states, and non-palimpsestic drafts that Derrida already diagnosed in the 1995 ITEM roundtable when he asked what Joyce would have done with a computer:

It would have changed any number of things. But I imagine, or I hope, that he would have kept multiple floppy disks at different stages. He would have treated the rough draft differently. He would have erased or substituted one word for another without leaving any trace, but at certain stages I imagine he would have been tempted to save a state of the manuscript on a separate disk, copy it, and then start over, etc., leaving behind drafts of a kind that don’t bear any relation to the ones you’re working on.

These new drafts are ontologically alien to the paper-based archive: clean erasures, parallel versions, no scarred surface left for the genetic critic. Ye is that Joyce, living the mutation at 2026 speed, the speeds of artificial internet cinema, the AI jumpcut cuts of Film01 as genre to come. The writing-cinema-music-Gestell enframing the entire process is the enframing itself—technology challenging-forth the creation, archive, overwrite, and multiplication of an infinite series of parallel “disks,” imposing its own use even (especially) in the moment of renunciation. Not AI, not not AI: lifetime jouissance.

The CapCut version of Monad 5 (says Willy on Letterboxd, another impressionable pad) compresses the most hype anime-loop segment into baile-funk/phonk ecstasy while the “normal version” lingers in the longer more desubjective drift, each cut refusing to stabilize into a “master text.” Monad 5 is not (not just) a fifth revision but a fifth state saved on a separate disk: ontologically alien to all previous Monads, just as “serotonin V2.5” was alien to the final Bully title track. The screenshot of the camera roll, says Willy on Letterboxd, is the perfect analogue of the multi-cut: something that, if you tried to artificially recreate it, you would fail; something that, once screenshotted and sent, becomes just as elusive as the succession of thumbnails it captured. The ChatGPT voice-chat convo at the end is the writing-Gestell speaking back in the most neutral-ass-bitch tone possible: tuned up or down, personality toggled on or off, the coding-agent version replying short and harsh because that part is deliberately turned off: we perform gestures calibrated to elicit an expected output, and any unexpected reply triggers the split, the BPD-like fear that the other will abruptly abandon us. Not neutral, not not neutral: lifetime jouissance. Not neutral ass bitch, not not neutral ass bitch. NO AI. NO NO AI. Etc. Not the version, just the “the.” The.

The exact record of the refusal is the black-screen post of 25 March 2026: BULLY ON THE WAY NO AI, three nouns, one preposition, one negation, handwritten tracklist photograph beneath it. Bruh, stop.

In his Parmenides Heidegger writes therefore:

This “machine,” operated in the closest vicinity to the word, is in use; it imposes its own use. Even if we do not actually operate this machine, it demands that we regard it if only to renounce and avoid it. This situation is constantly repeated everywhere, in all relations of modern man to technology. Technology is entrenched in our history.

The passage appears in the section on the hand, handwriting, the word, and the irruption of the typewriter, “the signless cloud.” In the 01 register, this Heideggerian riff from WW2 supplies the decisive turn: the machine (now the writing-Gestell of discrete digital drafts, parallel versions and multi-cut cinema) imposes its own use, bidding the “artist” (Ye, Film01, Monad, a timeline) to regard it precisely in order to renounce it (“NO AI”), while the renunciation itself is already enframed, archived, and fed back into the next ontologically alien state. The situation repeats everywhere: in every “BULLY ON THE WAY NO AI” post, every CapCut versus normal cut, every session death, every Paradise Cut of what now comes, every OpenAI protest in SF. These are the provocations of AI.

Said again, in whatever other version now repeats, the proliferation that precedes and survives this declarative AI is the real Gestell at work. From the V1 short film (Saint West, Hype Williams, demo-heavy states already carrying the uncanny valley of the clone) through the vinyl pressings that ship one vocal layer while streaming overwrites another, through the sanitized gospel pivots that turn “Gas Chamber” into “All Of The Love” and “Heil Hitler” into “Hallelujah,” through the charity-leaked Cuck files that circulate as contraband yet never stabilize, through the filename “serotonin V2.5” still visible in the metadata until the final overwrite, the work exists as a stack of discrete states rather than a scarred surface. The machine does not assist the writing; it redefines the draft itself as a series of instantly remixable, globally dispossessed versions.