ASAP Rocky Accused of Copying Video Artists' Work with AI in 'Shroom Clouds'

A six-second sequence in ASAP Rocky's music video for "Shroom Clouds" has been flagged as a near-exact copy of a 2019 clip built from 360-degree footage of parkour athlete Jason Paul — and two AI artists appear in the video's credits.

The accusation landed publicly via Emonee LaRussa (@em0n33y on Instagram), who compared the segment at roughly the 2:56 mark of "Shroom Clouds" against the original Instagram video made by creative director and VFX artist Cache Bunny. The sequence shows the rapper somersaulting through a kaleidoscopic effect.

The match, according to LaRussa, is not approximate. "There is practically no difference: the grass is the same, the shadows are the same," she said. Her framing of the dispute cuts to the legal fault line running through generative tools right now: "At what point does AI-generated content cross the line into copyright infringement?"

Who made the original, and how?

The source clip is real footage, not a render. Paul was filmed with a 360-degree camera on a football field, and Cache Bunny later transformed the capture into the finished artistic piece. Paul made the video with Cache Bunny and Los Angeles-based video artist Ari Fararooy seven years ago.

"We found ourselves on a football field with a little monopod and a 360 cam," Paul said. "Ari and Cache Bunny had a bunch of concepts ready for me, and I added my unique spin of action to it. We took an afternoon to shoot this, and then Cache Bunny worked her VFX magic and the result blew me away."

"I was quite surprised to see how similar his version was," Paul said of the "Shroom Clouds" segment. He got there with a joke that lands on a real anxiety for motion artists: "When I thought about AI stealing my job one day, I was worried about those damn Boston Dynamics robots that keep getting better at parkour, not rappers."

What does this change for credited artists?

For the people who made the original, the immediate question is practical, not philosophical. Paul says he is considering his options. Cache Bunny wrote on her Instagram story that she doesn't know what to do, but was blunt about the principle at stake: "Stealing artists' work is not ok, and that's not the precedent we want to set."

Her sharpest point is about how avoidable this was. "I can't understand why they didn't just reach out to license the clip, or make their own version inspired by it," she said.

Neither creator is aiming their anger at the rapper himself. "I'm not mad at ASAP Rocky. I love the dude's music. We even used it for one of our videos before," Paul said. "I'm sure he got his share of pay for clicks on that. It'd be nice if it went the other way."

His theory of the case puts responsibility somewhere in the production chain. "I'm just thinking, okay, it's not ASAP Rocky's fault, it's probably not his label's fault; they don't know every clip that was uploaded to Instagram and can spot a copy right away. Who can? But somebody along the line took that clip and thought it was fine to leave it that way."

Paul says he asked the director of "Shroom Clouds" directly. The answer: the director shot the music video five years ago and it is "out of my hands."

Where does the buck stop?

The credits have fueled the criticism. Fans of ASAP Rocky expressed disappointment that two AI artists are listed among the credited contributors to "Shroom Clouds" — a detail that turns an otherwise routine similarity claim into a test case for how AI-assisted production pipelines ingest existing work.

The irony is that ASAP Rocky has positioned himself as selective about the technology. In a recent interview with Complex magazine, he suggested he avoids using AI to create music from a prompt, though he doesn't judge others who do.

For now, no lawsuit has been announced, and neither creator has said which remedies they will pursue. What's on record is a demonstration of how a seven-year-old Instagram clip — an afternoon's shoot, a monopod, a 360 camera, and one VFX artist's finishing pass — can resurface inside a major-label music video with nobody along the production chain apparently noticing or asking permission. As AI tools make that kind of borrowing easier and harder to detect, licensing conversations like the one Cache Bunny says never happened are likely to become the industry's cheapest insurance.