For Drake and The Weeknd, two of the most popular musicians on the planet, the existence of “Heart on My Sleeve” is the existence of a track that claims to create a passable mimicry using AI versions of their voices. could have been considered a minor nuisance. — a short-lived novelty easily negated by powerful record companies.
But for others in the industry, the song is Viral curio on social media, racked up millions of plays on TikTok, Spotify, YouTube and more before being taken down this week — representing something more serious. Necessary rules are in place.
“Heart on My Sleeve” was the latest and loudest example of the gray area genre’s explosion in recent months. Homemade tracks that use Generative Artificial Intelligence techniques partially or fully to evoke familiar sounds. Authentic, or at least close enough. Quick comparisons were made to early technologies that disrupted the music industry, including the dawn of synthesizers, samplers, and his Napster file-sharing service.
nevertheless AI Rihanna singing Beyoncé songs again AI Kanye West sings “Hey There Delilah” It may seem like a harmless skylark, but the (albeit short) success of “Heart on My Sleeve” to the official streaming service, a clever online stream by an anonymous creator, With the marketing complete, alarms already ringing in the music business have intensified. I became concerned about AI models learning from and diluting copyrighted material.
Universal Music Group, the largest of the major labels and home of Drake and The Weeknd, already has flagged such content However, in a statement this week, the company said to wider stakeholders, “Every stakeholder in the music ecosystem wants to know which side of history they want to be on.” We asked: artists, fans, the side of human creative expression, or the side of deepfakes, fraud, denial of just compensation to artists.”
The artist and his label are confident that, at least for the time being, the social and emotional elements of fandom will separate the real Drake work from the fakes.
But whether superstars can pick their own pockets, or whether it’s going completely outdated in favor of machines that can imitate superstars, is only one side of the equation. can now be used to create rap beats, commercial jingles, or film scores, cutting into an already fragile economy for musicians.
And with generative AI booming and rapidly improving across text, images, sound, and video, experts say fans, artists, and the systems that manage them will have to adapt to new standards on the fly. technology has the potential to reshape the creative industries at every level.
“Now it’s immediately possible to create endless media in someone else’s style and caricature, so we all need to understand what that means.” used AI in her work For years I wrote in an e-mail.
“The question is, as a society, do we care what Drake really feels, or is it enough to hear superficially intellectual explanations?” she asked. “That’s not enough for some people. But it gets complicated when most people who listen to Spotify just listen to something for fun.
Uploaded by users known as ghostwriters, the breakthrough success of “Heart on My Sleeve” was especially successful with Open AI’s ChatGPT language model and DALL-E. Commenting under the track on YouTube, the ghostwriter promised, “This is just the beginning.”
Courts and legislators are just beginning to sort out ownership issues when it comes to AI, and music copyrights can get complicated on their own. Right now, only humans can create protected intellectual property, but what if musicians collaborate with machines?
Martin Clancy, musician and chairman of the Global Commission, said: Exploring the Ethics of AI in Artsaid the music industry is more organized than other sectors grappling with the rise of AI
“What is at stake is what we take for granted: listening to man-made music, people doing it for a living and being recognized as a special skill. is,” he said.
It was unclear exactly which elements of “Heart on My Sleeve” were created by AI, including the lyrics, instrumental beats, melody, and vocals (the ghostwriter declined to comment).
Some songs were written by real people, recorded with real human vocals, and AI mimics of famous artists using tools that “learned” from existing music to produce similar effects. has been replaced by These may give rise to one form of legal challenge. For example, artists and photographers sued image generator To create derivative versions of their work.
But when human creators pretend their songs are performed by well-known artists, or use the singer’s name or likeness to commercially promote it, it can lead to a different kind of legal threat. In the past, musicians, including Tom Waits and Bette Midler, have faced similar imitators in advertising to claim rights not only to their songs and recordings but also to their voices. He successfully argued in court that there was
In this case, it might have been easier for Drake, The Weeknd, and Universal Music to remove “Heart on My Sleeve” from services that earned streaming royalties and chart it on Billboard. The track appears to use a snippet of rapper Future’s popular vocals, suggesting the song was produced by Metro Boomin, a sample from his recording that was not allowed to be used. I was.
Drake, The Weeknd and Metro Boomin declined to comment. (In response to another track last week where he performed Ice Spice’s “Munch” using AI Drake’s voice, Drake cheekily wrote on his Instagram, “This is the last straw AI.”)
Such technology not only raises questions of legality, but can also raise complex ethical concerns about race and identity. Last year, Capitol Records apologized and removed his FN Meka on the digital rap avatar. This was due to criticism that the project amounted to a kind of blackface. Rap has emerged as the most popular playground in the recent surge of AI mimicry.
“It’s just another way for non-black people to wear black costumes. Hands up and puppets Kanye or Drake. That’s alarming to me.” Lauren Chanel, a writer on technology and culture. “This is another example of the long line of people who historically underestimate what it takes to create the type of art Black people make.”
But for musicians like Herndon, provided her own AI voice As a tool for other musicians (complete with a compensation system), the creation of a company called Spawning to create consent guidelines for AI could create the magic of fair and ethical exploitation of the future.
“There are more opportunities to explore this technology than to try to shut it down,” she said.
Meme art like “Heart on My Sleeve” may soon become a “true cultural force,” but “the novelty will eventually dry up,” she added. What remains is the artistic possibility of “when everyone can assume someone else’s identity even for a moment as a tool of expression.”
As the technology continues to advance and is employed in novel ways, producers like Prince Paul and J Dilla have turned to sampling for AI voice models, part of what Herndon calls “identity play.” Like it did, someone might eventually do it.
“As an artist, I’m interested in what it means for someone to be me with my permission. Maybe they’ll be better at being me in different ways,” Herndon said. Told. “The creative possibilities there are fascinating and will change art forever. You just have to understand the conditions and techniques.”
