A song featuring the voices of Drake and The Weeknd called “Heart On My Sleeve” has amassed over 250,000 Spotify streams and 10 million views on TikTok. However the two renowned musicians had nothing to do with the song — an artist going by the name “ghostwriter” generated the song using AI.
Drake and The Weeknd haven’t yet responded to the song, but Drake recently commented on AI-generated music that rips off his voice. When Drake noticed an AI model of himself singing “Munch” by Ice Spice, he wrote on his Instagram story, “That is the ultimate straw AI.” It’s possible he was messing around, but he could be removed from the primary major artist to take issue with the rising count of deepfake songs.
In 2020, Jay-Z’s agency Roc Nation submitted copyright strikes against YouTube uploads of AI-generated Jay-Z deepfakes, but YouTube ended up reinstating the videos. And just last week, the identical thing happened to Eminem; UMG, which represents each of those rappers, issued a copyright strike on AI-generated YouTube videos of Eminem rapping about cats.
Ghostwriter and Spotify didn’t immediately reply to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.
Copyright law will not be technologically advanced enough to have specific guidelines regarding generative AI. But within the legal code’s existing state, transformative parody is permissible. Nonetheless, these laws are very much open to interpretation, because the idea of what makes work “transformative” is subjective, and there may be little case law to set precedent — historically, lots of these cases have settled before reaching a judge.
UMG has recently taken steps to stop the proliferation of AI-generated music that rips off its recording artists. In line with a Financial Times report, UMG asked streaming services like Spotify to stop AI firms from using its music to coach their models.
“We’ve an ethical and industrial responsibility to our artists to work to stop the unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators,” a UMG representative said.
Once any sort of artistic work is an element of a dataset, it will probably be hard to remove it. To assist bring control back to artists, technologists Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon founded Spawning AI. One among their projects, “Have I Been Trained,” allows users to look for his or her artwork and see if it has been incorporated into an AI training set without their consent.
In some cases, though, removing one’s mental property from AI models might be like in search of a needle in a haystack. A living illustrator who has crafted detailed, high fantasy artwork for franchises like “Dungeons & Dragons,” Greg Rutkowski was one in every of Stable Diffusion’s hottest search terms when it launched in September, allowing users to simply replicate his distinctive style. Rutkowski never consented to his artwork getting used to coach the algorithm, and once the flood gates are opened, it could be too late for Rutkowski to regain the control he used to have over his work.
For now, Ghostwriter’s fake Drake and The Weeknd song stays on Spotify, nevertheless it is probably not there for long.