A song using AI-generated versions of the voices of Drake and The Weeknd is going gangbusters on TikTok, Spotify and SoundCloud.
The song, which runs to just over two minutes, was made by someone calling themselves “ghostwriter” on TikTok and Spotify. The artist(?) explained that they wrote and recorded the vocals themselves, before asking an AI tool to change their voice for that of Drake and The Weeknd.
It is unclear whether ghostwriter produced the beat but Metro Boomin’s producer tag appears at the start of the song.
@ghostwriter977this song is out. ‘Heart on My Sleeve – ghostwriter’♬ Heart on My Sleeve by Ghostwriter out everywhere. – ghostwriter
The song has proven remarkably popular — though largely because of its novelty rather than its quality — attracting more than seven million watches on TikTok and a quarter of a million streams on Spotify in two days.
Another creator posted a video explaining how the tech works.
And just like that. The music industry is forever changed.
I recorded a verse, and had a trained AI model of Kanye replace my vocals.
The results will blow your mind. Utterly incredible. pic.twitter.com/wY1pn9RGWx
— Roberto Nickson (@rpnickson) March 26, 2023
However, ghostwriter seems to have waded into something of a copyright grey area. While parody and pastiche are allowed under copyright law, impersonation is strictly forbidden, particularly if it causes a loss of commercial earnings.
However, given that ghostwriter is not claiming to be Drake, The Weeknd, or indeed, Metro Boomin, it could potentially be argued that by using their likeness with an AI-generated voice, all three artists could be set to lose out commercially.
The right of publicity is another area of intellectual property law that AI-generated music will likely fall foul of.
In the US, it protects against the misappropriation of a person’s name, likeness, or other indicators of personal identity — such as a nickname, pseudonym, voice, signature, likeness or photograph — for commercial benefit.
However, there is no such similar rule in Australia at the moment.
It is likely that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the body that gives our gold and platinum certification for records in the States will come down hard on AI tools. It previously forced file-sharing site Napster (ask your parents) to shut down, despite it demonstrating that it could remove 99.4 per cent of all licensed music immediately.
However, whether the RIAA will be able to keep up with the scale of content that generative AI can churn out remains to be seen.
