Last week a song generated by an artificial intelligence imitating the voices of Drake and The Weeknd became the obsession of social networks and the nightmare of record companies. Heart on my sleeve, the title of the song, managed to replicate almost perfectly the style and voice of the singers.
Now, just a few days later, another artist, Grimes, has decided to anticipate this potential new wave of AI-generated songs and has given her fans permission to use their voices in doing so. The only condition: if the song is a hit, Grimes keeps 50% of the profits, just like she would with any other musical collaboration.
“I’ll share 50% of the royalties on any AI-generated hit song that uses my voice. Same deal I get with any artist I collaborate with. You’re free to use my voice without penalty. I don’t have any record label deals, nor legal obligations,” he explained in a tweet.
Grimes added that she is open to any outcome and supported the use of open source-like licenses in art and an end to conventional copyright.
The decision contrasts with the ferocity that the traditional music industry has shown in the face of the phenomenon of Heart on my sleeve, which in a few days was played more than 8.5 million times on TikTok and 250,000 on Spotify before it was withdrawn.
Universal Music, Drake’s record label, immediately demanded an immediate cessation of distribution of the song on all platforms. “Training generative AI using the music of our artists represents both a violation of our agreements and a violation of copyright law,” they explained from the label.
The song isn’t the first to have been generated using these types of techniques with well-known vocals, but its success proves that the technology is mature enough to fool a listener. Nowadays, machine learning techniques allow the creation of artificial intelligence models that are capable of cloning a voice in a quite realistic way using a few pre-recorded seconds as an example.
In a way, it is a phenomenon analogous to deepfakes, which superimpose the faces of well-known actors on a video, copying the original facial expressions, and which is causing a headache for the audiovisual industry.
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