artificial intelligence
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A bipartisan group of four senators led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is recommending that Congress spend at least $32 billion over the next three years to develop artificial intelligence and place safeguards around it, writing in a new report released Wednesday that the U.S. needs to “harness the opportunities and address the risks” of the quickly developing technology.
The group of two Democrats and two Republicans said in an interview Tuesday that while they sometimes disagreed on the best paths forward, it was imperative to find consensus with the technology taking off and other countries like China investing heavily in its development. They settled on a raft of broad policy recommendations that were included in their 33-page report.
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While any legislation related to AI will be difficult to pass, especially in an election year and in a divided Congress, the senators said that regulation and incentives for innovation are urgently needed.
“It’s complicated, it’s difficult, but we can’t afford to put our head in the sand,” said Schumer, D-N.Y., who convened the group last year after AI chatbot ChatGPT entered the marketplace and showed that it could in many ways mimic human behavior.
The group recommends in the report that Congress draft “emergency” spending legislation to boost U.S. investments in artificial intelligence, including new research and development and new testing standards to try and understand the potential harms of the technology. The group also recommended new requirements for transparency as artificial intelligence products are rolled out and that studies be conducted into the potential impact of AI on jobs and the U.S. workforce.
Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a member of the group, said the money would be well spent not only to compete with other countries who are racing into the AI space but also to improve Americans’ quality of life — supporting technology that could help cure some cancers or chronic illnesses, he said, or improvements in weapons systems could help the country avoid a war.
“This is a time in which the dollars we put into this particular investment will pay dividends for the taxpayers of this country long term,” he said.
The group came together a year ago after Schumer made the issue a priority — an unusual posture for a majority leader — and brought in Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Republican Sen. Todd Young of Indiana and Rounds of South Dakota.
As the four senators began meeting with tech executives and experts, Schumer said in a speech over the summer that the rapid growth of artificial intelligence tools was a “moment of revolution” and that the government must act quickly to regulate companies that are developing it.
Young said the development of ChatGPT, along with other similar models, made them realize that “we’re going to have to figure out collectively as an institution” how to deal with the technology.
“In the same breath that people marveled at the possibilities of just that one generative AI platform, they began to hypothesize about future risks that might be associated with future developments of artificial intelligence,” Young said.
While passing legislation will be tough, the group’s recommendations lay out the first comprehensive road map on an issue that is complex and has little precedent for consideration in Congress. The group spent almost a year compiling the list of policy suggestions after talking privately and publicly to a range of technology companies and other stakeholders, including in eight forums to which the entire Senate was invited.
The first forum in September included Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and owner of X, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Schumer said after the private meeting that he had asked everyone in the room — including almost two dozen tech executives, advocates and skeptics — whether government should have a role in the oversight of artificial intelligence, and “every single person raised their hand.”
The four senators are pitching their recommendations to Senate committees, which are then tasked with reviewing them and trying to figure out what is possible. The Senate Rules Committee is already moving forward with legislation, voting on Wednesday on three bills that would ban deceptive AI content used to influence federal elections, require AI disclaimers on political ads and create voluntary guidelines for state election offices that oversee candidates.
Schumer, who controls the Senate’s schedule, said those election bills were among the chamber’s “highest priorities” this year. He also said he planned to sit down with House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has expressed interest in looking at AI policy but has not said how he would do that.
Some experts warn that the U.S. is behind many other countries on the issue, including the EU which took the lead in March when they gave final approval to a sweeping new law governing artificial intelligence in the 27-nation bloc. Europe’s AI Act sets tighter rules for the AI products and services deemed to pose the highest risks, such as in medicine, critical infrastructure or policing. But it also includes provisions regulating a new class of generative AI systems like ChatGPT that have rapidly advanced in recent years.
“It’s time for Congress to act,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology. “It’s not enough to focus on investment and innovation. We need guardrails to ensure the responsible development of AI.”
The senators emphasized balance between those two issues, and also the urgency of action.
“We have the lead at this moment in time on this issue, and it will define the relationship between the United States and our allies and other competing powers in the world for a long time to come,” Heinrich said.
When Drake dismissively told Metro Boomin to go and “make some drums” in one of his recent diss tracks during his beef with Kendrick Lamar, the superproducer went off and did just that — and the result marked a turning point for the use of AI in music production.
The beat, titled “BBL Drizzy,” pairs a vintage-sounding soul vocalist over some 808 drums. The producer released it to SoundCloud on May 5, encouraging his fans to record their own bars over it for the chance to win a free beat, and it swiftly went viral.
But soon after, it was revealed that the singer from the “BBL Drizzy” beat didn’t exist — the voice was AI-generated, as was the song itself. The vocals, melody and instrumental of the sample were generated by Udio, an AI music startup founded by former Google Deep Mind engineers. Though Metro was not aware of the source of the track when he used it, his tongue-in-cheek diss became the first notable use case of AI-generated sampling, proving the potential for AI to impact music production. (A representative for Metro Boomin did not respond to Billboard’s request for comment).
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As with all AI tracks, however, a human being prompted it. King Willonius, a comedian, musician and content creator, had put together the Udio-generated song on April 14, pulling inspiration from a recent Rick Ross tweet — in which the rapper joked that Drake looks like he got a Brazilian Butt Lift — to write the lyrics. “I think it’s a misconception that people think AI wrote ‘BBL Drizzy,’” Willonius told Billboard in an interview about the track. “There’s no way AI could write lyrics like ‘I’m thicker than a Snicker and I got the best BBL in history,’” he adds, laughing.
There are a lot of issues — legal, philosophical, cultural and technical — that are still to be sorted out before this kind of sampling hits the mainstream, but it’s not hard to imagine a future where producers turn to AI to create vintage-sounding samples to chop up and use in beats given that sample clearances are notoriously complicated and can drag on for months or years, even for big name producers like Metro Boomin.
“If people on the other side [of sample clearance negotiations] know they’re probably going to make money on the new song, like with a Metro Boomin-level artist, they will make it a priority to clear a sample quickly, but that’s not how it is for everyone,” says Todd Rubenstein, a music attorney and founder of Todd Rubenstein Law. Grammy-winning writer/producer Oak Felder says clearing a sample for even a high-profile track is still a challenge for him. “I’ll be honest, I’m dealing with a tough clearance right now, and I’ve dealt with it before,” he says. “I had trouble clearing an Annie Lennox sample for a Nicki Minaj record once… It’s hard.”
Many smaller producers are not able to sample established songs because they know that it could get them into legal trouble. Others go ahead without permission, causing massive legal headaches, like when bedroom producer Young Kio sampled an undisclosed Nine Inch Nails song in an instrumental he licensed out on BeatStars. The beat was used by then-unknown Lil Nas X and resulted in the Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 “Old Town Road.” When the sample was discovered, Nas was forced to give up a large portion of his publishing and master royalties to the band.
Udio’s co-founder, David Ding, tells Billboard that he believes AI samples “could simplify a lot of the rights management” issues inherent to sampling and explains that Udio’s model is particularly adept at making realistic songs in the vein of “Motown ‘70s soul,” perhaps the most common style of music sampled in hip-hop today, as well as classical, electronic and more. “It’s a wide-ranging model,” Ding says.
Willonius believes AI samples also offer a solution for musicians in today’s relentless online news cycle. While he has made plenty of songs from scratch before, Willonius says AI offered him the chance to respond in real-time to the breakneck pace of the feud between Drake and Kendrick. “I never could’ve done that without AI tools,” he says. Evan Bogart, a Grammy-winning songwriter and founder of Seeker Music, likens it to a form of digital crate digging. “I think it’s super cool to use AI in this way,” he says. “It’s good for when you dig and can’t find the right fit. Now, you can also try to just generate new ideas that sound like old soul samples.”
There’s a significant financial impact incurred from traditional sampling that could also be avoided with AI. To use the melody of “My Favorite Things” in her hit song “7 Rings,” for example, Ariana Grande famously had to cede 90% of her publishing income for the song to “My Favorite Things” writers Rodgers and Hammerstein — and that was just an interpolation rather than a full sample, which entails both the use of compositional elements, like melody, and a portion of the sound recording.
“It certainly could help you having to avoid paying other people and avoid the hassle,” says Rubenstein, who has often dealt with the complications of clearing songs that use samples and beats from marketplaces like BeatStars. But he adds that any user of these AI models must use caution, saying it won’t always make clearances easier: “You really need to know what the terms of service are whenever you use an AI model, and you should know how they train their AI.”
Often, music-making AI models train on copyrighted material without the consent or compensation of its rights holders, a practice that is largely condemned by the music business — even those who are excited about the future of AI tools. Though these AI companies argue this is “fair use,” the legality of this practice is still being determined in the United States. The New York Times has launched a lawsuit against OpenAI for training on its copyrighted archives without consent, credit or compensation, and UMG, Concord, ABKCO and other music publishers have also filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for using their lyrics to train the company’s large language model. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has also introduced a new bill called the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act to require transparency on this matter.
Udio’s terms of service puts the risk of sharing its AI songs on users, saying that users “shall defend, indemnify, and hold the company entities harmless from and against any and all claims, costs, damages, losses, liabilities and expenses” that come from using whatever works are generated on the platform. In an interview with Billboard, Udio co-founder Ding was unable to answer what works were specifically used in its training data. “We can’t reveal the exact source of our training data. We train our model on publicly available data that we obtained from the internet. It’s basically, like, we train the model on good music just like how human musicians would listen to music,” says Ding. When pressed about copyrights in particular, he replies, “We can’t really comment on that.”
“I think if it’s done right, AI could make things so much easier in this area. It’s extremely fun and exciting but only with the proper license,” says Diaa El All, CEO/founder of Soundful, another AI music company that generates instrumentals specifically. His company is certified by Fairly Trained, a non-profit that ensures certified companies do not use copyrighted materials in training data without consent. El All says that creating novel forms of AI sampling “is a huge focus” for his company, adding that Soundful is working with an artist right now to develop a fine-tuned model to create AI samples based on pre-existing works.
“I can’t tell you who it is, but it’s a big rapper,” he says. “His favorite producer passed away. The rapper wants to leverage a specific album from that producer to sample. So we got a clearance from the producer’s team to now build a private generative AI model for the rapper to use to come up with beats that are inspired by that producer’s specific album.”
While this will certainly have an impact on the way producers work in the future, Felder and Bogart say that AI sampling will never totally replace the original practice. “People love nostalgia; that’s what a sample can bring,” says Felder. With the success of sample-driven pop songs at the top of the Hot 100 and the number of movie sequels hitting box office highs, it’s clear that there is an appetite for familiarity, and AI originals cannot feed that same craving.
“BBL Drizzy” might’ve been made as a joke, but Felder believes the beat has serious consequences. “I think this is very important,” he says. “This is one of the first successful uses [AI sampling] on a commercial level, but in a year’s time, there’s going to be 1,000 of these. Well, I bet there’s already a thousand of these now.”
This story is included in Billboard‘s new music technology newsletter, Machine Learnings. To subscribe to this and other Billboard newsletters, click here.
It has been more than a decade since Randy Travis has recorded new music. But on Friday (May 3) the country legend released the gentle “Where That Came From,” an emotional ballad featuring his signature warm baritone and lovestruck lyrics.
In an interview with CBS News Sunday Morning‘s Lee Cowan slated to air this weekend Travis’ longtime producer describes how the singer’s team constructed the track using artificial intelligence in the wake of the near-fatal 2013 stroke that took away the Grammy-winning country star’s voice.
“It’s Randy Travis. Randy’s on the other side of the microphone … It’s still his vocal,” says Cris Lacey, co-chair/president of Warner Music Nashville in the interview. “There’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to make music … And to deprive him of that, if he still wants to do that, that’s unconscionable to me.”
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While Lacey acknowledges the “chatter about all the negative sides of AI,” he says that when the Travis team began thinking about recording “Where That Came From” using AI they wondered what that would look like for them. “And the first thing that came to mind… was we would give Randy Travis his voice back,” Lacey says.
According to the piece, when Travis suffered the stroke doctors gave him a 2% chance of surviving after discovering that in addition to paralysis the brain attack caused damage to the area of his brain controlling speech and language that had left it nearly beyond repair.
Cowan also spoke with Travis, 64, and wife Mary for the piece that takes viewers behind-the-scenes for a look at how longtime producer Kyle Lehning pieced together the song with the singer’s blessing using old audio tracks of his voice as a launching pad. With another singer pitching in, a custom AI program overlaid Travis’ voice on the new recording, with Lehning using the country legend’s input to “painstakingly” mold the AI-generated vocals into a song that felt authentically Travis.
“It’s not about how it sounds. It’s about how it feels,” Lehning says. “Him being here and him being able to be, you know, a vital part of the decision-making process makes all the difference to me.” If he’s being honest, though, Lehning says when he first realized that the AI experiment was working it, “freaked me out… when I played it back it was like, ‘oh my!’ And I immediately thought, ‘this might work.’”
The more he listened and dug into the nuance, Lehning says the song clearly needed more “massaging,” which required him to approach it “syllable-by-syllable.”
Cowan also observed the moment when Travis’ fellow country music friends and family heard the song for the first time, with stepdaughter Cavanaugh Mauch commenting, “It’s so weird to try and explain everything that goes through your head when you’re listening to it.”
In the wake of the stroke, Travis’ manager Tony Conway cooked up the idea for The Music of Randy Travis tour, which features the singer’s eight-piece band fronted by James Dupré, who played Travis’ son in the 2015 movie The Price. The latest iteration of that show, the More Life tour, is currently on the road, with the next date slated for May 23 at The Paramount in Abilene, Texas.
Travis — who was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2016 — has also released a trio of albums post-stroke, including two volumes of covers, Influence Vol. 1: The Man I Am and Influence Vol. 2: The Man I Am, as well as 2020’s Precious Memories (Worship & Faith), a collection of worship songs recorded in Feb. 2003 at the Calvary Assembly of God in Orlando.
The CBS News piece will run on Sunday (May 5) at 9 a.m. ET on CBS and Paramount+. Listen to “Where That Came From” and watch a preview of the CBS segment below.
“It freaked me out.” In 2013 country music star @randytravis suffered a stroke that robbed him of his singing voice. Travis’ longtime producer, Kyle Lehning, gives Lee Cowan an exclusive inside look at how cutting-edge AI enabled Travis to once again raise his voice in song. pic.twitter.com/vxzXQ5k2OK— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) May 3, 2024
Drake’s track with an AI 2Pac verse didn’t last long. A day after the Tupac Shakur estate threatened to sue Drake for using an AI imitation of the later rapper’s voice on “Taylor Made Freestyle,” he took down the recording. In using 2Pac’s voice, though, Drake opened yet another important debate about generative AI that reveals just how risky the business is — and how rightsholders may have more power to shape it than they realize.
So let’s get legal! In the cease-and-desist letter he sent on behalf of the Shakur estate, lawyer Howard King referenced both Shakur’s personality rights, which encompasses publicity rights, or what some states refer to as likeness rights, plus the copyrights to the rapper’s recordings and songs. Most coverage of this focused on the former issue, since personality rights are relatively straightforward — Shakur’s estate controls the rights to the rapper’s distinctive style. The second gets complicated, since the recording copyrights — and potentially the song copyrights — have less to do with Drake’s use of 2Pac-style vocals than how he was able to create them in the first place.
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To create such a convincing imitation of 2Pac, an AI model would almost certainly have to ingest — and, in the course of doing so, copy — a significant number of Shakur’s recordings. So King, in his letter, demanded from Drake “a detailed explanation for how the sound-alike was created and the persons or company that created it, including all recordings and other data ‘scraped’ or used.” Any answer Drake gave would have taken the issue into legal terra incognita — an AI’s ingestion of recordings and songs would implicate copyright, although it’s not clear if this could be done without a license under fair use. The stakes would be high, though. As opposed to a California right of publicity violation, which would be relatively easy to prove and incur limited damages, copyright infringement is federal and comes with statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed. That means a company that ingests 20 works to create one would be liable a maximum of $3 million.
For the last year, music creators and rightsholders have been talking about generative AI as something that’s coming — the deals they’ll negotiate, the terms they’ll set, the business they’ll do — once they negotiate the right deals. But technology companies tend to beg forgiveness rather than ask permission, and it seems some of them have already ingested a considerable amount of music for AI without a license. Think about it: None of the major labels have announced deals for AI companies to ingest their catalogs of recordings, but enough recordings have been ingested to make AI vocal imitations of Drake, 2Pac, Snoop — even Frank Sinatra doing Lil Jon’s “Skeet skeet.” That means that a company or companies could be in big trouble. Or that they have a first-mover advantage over their rivals. Or both.
Part of the reason technology companies forge ahead is that deals that involve new technology get complicated. In this case, how do you value a license you’re not sure you need? If you think that companies need a license to ingest music for the purposes of allowing users to make AI vocal imitations — as seems likely — the price for that license is going to be relatively high, with complicated terms, because rightsholders would presumably want to be compensated on an ongoing basis. (It’s insanely difficult to create a fair one-time license to ingest a catalog of music: first, since copyright law controls copying, the licensor would forfeit any control not specified in the contract; second, it would be hard for a potential buyer to raise the kind of money a seller might want, so the economics of ongoing payments make more sense.) If you think that ingestion would fall under fair use — which is very possible in some edge cases but much less so generally — why would you pay a high fee, much less constrain yourself with complicated terms?
The legal cases that will tip the scales in one direction or the other will proceed at the speed of litigation, which moves slower than culture, much less technology. The first big case will be against Anthropic, which Universal Music, Concord, ABKCO and other music publishers sued in October for training an AI on lyrics to compositions they control. (Universal’s agreement with YouTube on AI principles might make a ruling that this is fair use somewhat less likely, since it shows that major labels are willing to license their music.) There are already other cases in other parts of the media business — The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, for example — and one of them could set an important precedent.
Until that happens — and maybe after, too — there will be settlements. Very few rightsholders have much of an interest in stopping AI — some could in some cases, but it’s a losing battle. What they really want to do is leverage the power they have to destroy, or at least delay, a nascent business in order to shape it. (“The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it,” in the words of Paul Atreides, Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, who might be exaggerating but certainly has a point.) That will give them real power — not only to monetize music with AI but to shape the terms of engagement in a way that, let’s face it, is likely to favor big companies with big catalogs. It will be interesting to see what they do with it.
SAG-AFTRA members have voted to ratify the 2024 Sound Recordings Code which requires the record labels — Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Disney Music Group — to abide by its AI safety rules. Notably, these are the first-ever explicitly defined compensation requirements for the release of sound recordings containing AI voices.
With a vote of 97.69% to 2.31%, SAG-AFTRA members, which include actors as well as singers and recording artists, now will receive this protections, effective immediately, for the term of 2021-2026. Now, the term “artist,” “singer” and “royalty artist” under this agreement only can refer to human talent. “Clear and conspicuous” consent is required prior to the release of a sound recording that uses a digital replication of an artist’s voice.
Artists who are replicated are also entitled to receive specific details about the replica’s intended use and to minimum compensation. Compensation for artists must align with the royalty share the artist would earn on other sound recordings under their contract, and sessions singers must receive a minimum of three sides per project. A minimum of 28 hours notice of any recording session for the purpose of creating a digital replica is expected and that session time should be paid as work time.
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Additionally, blanket consent for digital or AI replication is prohibited. Instead, record labels must obtain consent on a per-project basis — a provision which will prevent labels from asking artists to sign away their digital likeness for lengthy terms as part of their deals.
In the year since Ghostwriter’s fake-Drake song “Heart On My Sleeve” brought conversations about AI voices to the forefront, little has been done to actually enforce the protection of artists’ identities. While the federal government is considering a few bills (like the draft NO FAKES Act and the NO AI FRAUD Act) to create a nationwide right of publicity that would create uniform protection for artists’ names, images, and voices, these protections, for now, remain a patchwork of varying state laws that were largely written before artificial intelligence presented new use cases for AI.
“Singers and recording artists have a profound impact on our culture, and I’m thrilled that they’ve achieved a contract that not only recognizes their value with significant wage increases, but also provides them essential protections around artificial intelligence,” said SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher. “We celebrate our human performers! I applaud the negotiating committee and staff, the record labels, and SAG-AFTRA members for getting this contract across the finish line!”
SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said, “This contract secures groundbreaking A.I. guardrails while also achieving crucial and substantial wage increases, and other key wins for singers and recording artists. Protecting human artistry will always be SAG-AFTRA’s priority, and I’m heartened that our members have a contract that provides immediate gains and recognizes the importance of human contributions to the industry. I also want to acknowledge Negotiating Committee Chair Dan Navarro and the entire committee and staff for their outstanding and dedicated work in achieving this agreement.”
Sound Recordings Code Negotiating Committee Chair Dan Navarro said, “Members’ feedback played a key role in the formation of this contract and the negotiating committee prioritized the concerns that were most crucial to the singers and recording artists impacted by these terms. We’re proud to have achieved these essential wins in A.I. protections along with substantial wage increases and gains in health and retirement funding.”
Other wins included wage increases and gains in health and retirement funding. To read the full list of provisions, see here.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee convened on Tuesday (April 30) to discuss a proposed bill that would effectively create a federal publicity right for artists in a hearing that featured testimony from Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl, artist FKA Twigs, Digital Media Association (DiMA) CEO Graham Davies, SAG-AFTRA national executive director/chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Motion Picture Association senior vp/associate general counsel Ben Sheffner and the University of San Diego professor Lisa P. Ramsey.
The draft bill — called the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act (NO FAKES Act) — would create a federal right for artists, actors and others to sue those who create “digital replicas” of their image, voice, or visual likeness without permission. Those individuals have previously only been protected through a patchwork of state “right of publicity” laws. First introduced in October, the NO FAKES Act is supported by a bipartisan group of U.S. senators including Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).
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Warner Music Group (WMG) supports the NO FAKES Act along with many other music businesses, the RIAA and the Human Artistry Campaign. During Kyncl’s testimony, the executive noted that “we are in a unique moment of time where we can still act and we can get it right before it gets out of hand,” pointing to how the government was not able to properly handle data privacy in the past. He added that it’s imperative to get out ahead of artificial intelligence (AI) to protect artists’ and entertainment companies’ livelihoods.
“When you have these deepfakes out there [on streaming platforms],” said Kyncl, “the artists are actually competing with themselves for revenue on streaming platforms because there’s a fixed amount of revenue within each of the streaming platforms. If somebody is uploading fake songs of FKA Twigs, for example, and those songs are eating into that revenue pool, then there is less left for her authentic songs. That’s the economic impact of it long term, and the volume of content that will then flow into the digital service providers will increase exponentially, [making it] harder for artists to be heard, and to actually reach lots of fans. Creativity over time will be stifled.”
Kyncl, who recently celebrated his first anniversary at the helm of WMG, previously held the role of chief business officer at YouTube. When questioned about whether platforms, like YouTube, Spotify and others who are represented by DiMA should be held responsible for unauthorized AI fakes on their platforms, Kyncl had a measured take: “There has to be an opportunity for [the services] to cooperate and work together with all of us to [develop a protocol for removal],” he said.
During his testimony, Davies spoke from the perspective of the digital service providers (DSPs) DiMA represents. “There’s been no challenge [from platforms] in taking down the [deepfake] content expeditiously,” he said. “We don’t see our members needing any additional burdens or incentives here. But…if there is to be secondary liability, we would very much seek that to be a safe harbor for effective takedowns.”
Davies added, however, that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which provides a notice and takedown procedure for copyright infringement, is not a perfect model to follow for right of publicity offenses. “We don’t see [that] as being a good process as [it was] designed for copyright…our members absolutely can work with the committee in terms of what we would think would be an effective [procedure],” said Davies. He added, “It’s really essential that we get specific information on how to identify the offending content so that it can be removed efficiently.”
There is currently no perfect solution for tracking AI deepfakes on the internet, making a takedown procedure tricky to implement. Kyncl said he hopes for a system that builds on the success of YouTube’s Content ID, which tracks sound recordings. “I’m hopeful we can take [a Content ID-like system] further and apply that to AI voice and degrees of similarity by using watermarks to label content and care the provenance,” he said.
The NO FAKES draft bill as currently written would create a nationwide property right in one’s image, voice, or visual likeness, allowing an individual to sue anyone who produced a “newly-created, computer-generated, electronic representation” of it. It also includes publicity rights that would not expire at death and could be controlled by a person’s heirs for 70 years after their passing. Most state right of publicity laws were written far before the invention of AI and often limit or exclude the protection of an individual’s name, image and voice after death.
The proposed 70 years of post-mortem protection was one of the major points of disagreement between participants at the hearing. Kyncl agreed with the points made by Crabtree-Ireland of SAG-AFTRA — the actors’ union that recently came to a tentative agreement with major labels, including WMG, for “ethical” AI use — whose view was that the right should not be limited to 70 years post-mortem and should instead be “perpetual,” in his words.
“Every single one of us is unique, there is no one else like us, and there never will be,” said Crabtree-Ireland. “This is not the same thing as copyright. It’s not the same thing as ‘We’re going to use this to create more creativity on top of that later [after the copyright enters public domain].’ This is about a person’s legacy. This is about a person’s right to give this to their family.”
Kyncl added simply, “I agree with Mr. Crabtree-Ireland 100%.”
However, Sheffner shared a different perspective on post-mortem protection for publicity rights, saying that while “for living professional performers use of a digital replica without their consent impacts their ability to make a living…that job preservation justification goes away post-mortem. I have yet to hear of any compelling government interest in protecting digital replicas once somebody is deceased. I think there’s going to be serious First Amendment problems with it.”
Elsewhere during the hearing, Crabtree-Ireland expressed a need to limit how long a young artist can license out their publicity rights during their lifetime to ensure they are not exploited by entertainment companies. “If you had, say, a 21-year-old artist who’s granting a transfer of rights in their image, likeness or voice, there should not be a possibility of this for 50 years or 60 years during their life and not have any ability to renegotiate that transfer. I think there should be a shorter perhaps seven-year limitation on this.”
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: Tupac’s estate threatens to sue Drake over his use of the late rapper’s voice; Megan Thee Stallion faces a lawsuit over eye-popping allegations from her former cameraman; Britney Spears settles her dispute with her father; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Drake, Tupac & An AI Showdown
The debate over unauthorized voice cloning burst into the open last week when Tupac Shakur’s estate threatened to sue Drake over a recent diss track against Kendrick Lamar that featured an AI-generated version of the late rapper’s voice.In a cease-and-desist letter first reported by Billboard, litigator Howard King told Drake that the Shakur estate was “deeply dismayed and disappointed” by the rapper’s use of Tupac’s voice in his “Taylor Made Freestyle.” The letter warned Drake to confirm in less than 24 hours that he would pull the track down or the estate would “pursue all of its legal remedies” against him.“Not only is the record a flagrant violation of Tupac’s publicity and the estate’s legal rights, it is also a blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time. The Estate would never have given its approval for this use.”AI-powered voice cloning has been top of mind for the music industry since last spring when an unknown artist released a track called “Heart On My Sleeve” that featured — ironically — fake verses from Drake’s voice. As such fake vocals have continued to proliferate on the internet, industry groups, legal experts and lawmakers have wrangled over how best to crack down on them.With last week’s showdown, that debate jumped from hypothetical to reality. The Tupac estate laid out actual legal arguments for why it believed Drake’s use of the late rapper’s voice violated the law. And those arguments were apparently persuasive: Within 24 hours, Drake began to pull his song from the internet.
For more details on the dispute, go read our full story here.
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Over the past week, the feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake has entered into a new, more modern realm than any rap beef before it: AI.
As the back and forth has escalated, and fans wait to see what each of the hip-hop heavyweights will say next, a number of fan-fabricated diss tracks began circulating on social media using AI voices to mimic the emcees. And while some were obviously not real — and, thankfully, were voluntarily labeled AI by their authors — others were more convincing, leading to widespread confusion.
People questioned if Drake’s “Push Ups” was real (it was), and if Lamar’s supposed reply, “1 Shot 1 Kill” was real, too (it wasn’t). YouTube is rife with more AI replications, and some are amassing big audiences, including one called “To Kill A Butterfly,” which has amassed 508,000 views to date. To make matters even more convoluted, Drake himself took part in the trend, employing AI to replicate the voices of West Coast legends Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg on his diss “Taylor Made,” released on X and Instagram on Friday without their permission, prompting Shakur’s estate to send Drake a cease-and-desist letter.
The phenomenon has illustrated the sizable impact that AI has already had on modern fandom, as impatient fans use generative AI tools to fill in gaps in the conversation and imagine further storylines with a type of uncanny accuracy that was never before possible. And for better or for worse, it has become the most prominent use-case of generative AI in the music industry to date.
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This trend in AI use has its origins with Ghostwriter, the controversial TikTok user who deepfaked Drake and The Weeknd’s voices on his song “Heart On My Sleeve” one year ago, in April 2023. In a cover story for Billboard, Ghostwriter and his manager first compared AI voice filters to a form of “fan fiction — a fan-generated genre of music,” as the manager put it.
Traditional, written fan fiction has been a way for fans to engage with their favorite media for decades — whether that’s franchises like Star Wars, Marvel or Twilight, or the music of stars like Drake and Lamar. In it, fans can expand on details that were never fully fleshed out in the original work and write their own storylines and endings. AI fan creations inspired by Drake and Lamar’s beef are doing something similar, letting music fans imagine the artist’s next move and picture collaborations that haven’t happened yet.
Historically, fan fiction is great for the original artist from a marketing point of view. It is one of many forms of user-generated content (UGC) on the internet today that can engage superfans further with the original project without its author having to lift a finger.
But with traditional fan fiction, fans could easily tell where the official canon started and ended, and the writing was often relegated to superfan hot spots like Watt Pad, Discord, Reddit or fan zines. This new form of ‘AI fan fiction’ makes this distinction a lot less obvious and spreads it much wider. For now, trained ears can still tell when AI voices are used like this today, given the slight glitchiness still found in the audio quality, but soon these models will be so good that discerning AI from reality will be virtually impossible.
There is still not a good way to confidently figure out which songs use AI and which do not, and to make matters worse, these fan-made songs are more commonly posted to general social media platforms than written fan-fiction. In a search about this rap beef on X or YouTube, listeners are likely to run into a few AI fan tracks along the way, and many lack the expertise of a superfan to sniff out and differentiate what’s real and what’s fake.
In a time when fans demand nonstop connection to and content from their favorite talents, it is especially common for fans of elusive artists to take matters into their own hands with AI tools — including voices as well as other generative works like images, videos and text. In the absence of a Kendrick response to Drake last week, for example, “1 Shot 1 Kill” was produced by a 23-year-old fan who goes by Sy The Rapper. In an interview with Complex, Sy said he used the tool Voicify to imagine Lamar on the track. (Notably, the RIAA recently reported Voicify to the U.S. government’s piracy watch list).
Followers of famously elusive artist Frank Ocean also had fun with generative AI in the last year, with one fan, @tannerchauct, showing others on X how to create their own alternative forms of Ocean’s album artwork using DALLE-2, an image generator. A Cardi B fan, @iYagamiLight, even dreamed up the creative direction for an entirely fictional Cardi B project with AI, earning them thousands of retweets in October. The user’s cover art rendered Cardi B in a bedazzled corset and posing in a clawfoot bathtub, peacock feathers fanning out around her. They also created a fake tracklist and release date.
The downside of fan-made works has always been the same: they have the tendency to infringe on the artist’s copyrights, to use an artist’s name, image, voice or likeness without permission, or to generally profit from the artist’s work without sharing the spoils. This new age of AI fan fiction and UGC makes all of these pre-existing problems exponentially harder to police.
The Cardi B fan, for example, did not disclose that their work was AI-generated or fictional, and instead paired their creative direction with the misleading caption “Cardi B just announced her long awaited sophomore album “Mayura” coming out Friday 12th January 2024!”
In a recent music law conference at Vanderbilt University, Colin Rushing, general counsel of the Digital Media Association (DiMA) downplayed the commercial impact of AI in music so far, saying that, since Ghostwriter, “one of the things we really haven’t seen in the [last] year is an epidemic of ‘fake-Drakes’ climbing the charts. We’re not seeing popular examples of this in the commercial marketplace.”
Rushing is right — that hasn’t happened yet. Even Drake’s own AI-assisted song is not on streaming services, and thus is not eligible for the charts. (and if the lawyer for Tupac’s estate has his way, it will soon be removed from the internet entirely.) But this rap feud has revealed that while it hasn’t impacted the charts or the “commercial marketplace” all that much, it has impacted something possibly even more important to an artist today: fandoms.
Only one word really describes Drake’s shift from objecting to an AI impersonation of him to using similar technology to add imitations of 2Pac and Snoop Dogg to his Kendrick Lamar diss track “Taylor Made Freestyle”: Chutzpah. (Drake had a bar-mitzvah-themed 31st birthday party, so he probably knows the term.) Last year around this time, the infamous “Heart on My Sleeve,” which featured AI vocal imitations of Drake and The Weeknd, shifted the debate about music and AI into high gear. Ever since, industry lobbyists and artists rights groups have been pushing legislation to regulate generative AI technology based on concepts of rights and permissions. Now Drake goes and blatantly breaks the main principle involved. It’s like something out of a political attack ad: He was against this before he was for it!
To me, using artists’ voices without their permission is wrong and it’s even more wrong — creepier — if the artist in question died relatively recently. The legal situation around this, and AI in general, is in flux, though. Tennessee’s ELVIS Act just passed, and a few federal bills have significant support. But the main point of the ELVIS Act and most of the recently proposed legislation is to impose penalties for exactly the kind of thing Drake did.
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And Drake, who must know these laws are necessary because a year ago they would have helped him, just made it harder to pass them. Imagine you’re a music business lobbyist who spent the last year explaining to members of Congress how important it is to protect the unique sounds of particular performers and then suddenly one of the biggest artists in the world goes ahead and violates every principle you’ve been discussing. Forget about Lamar — where’s the diss track from the RIAA?
It’s hard to say for sure whether what Drake did was illegal because laws vary by state — that’s why we need federal legislation in the first place. But Drake seems to have released the recording without his label, Republic Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group, which could indicate some concerns. (A representative for Drake declined to comment and Universal did not respond to requests for comment.) And Tupac Shakur’s estate has threatened to sue if Drake doesn’t take the track offline. (Snoop Dogg’s reaction — “They did what? When? How? Are you sure?,” followed by a weary sigh — is a work of art in itself. 10/10, no notes.) Litigation could be complicated, though. The Shakur estate threatened to sue for a violation of Shakur’s right of publicity, as well as for copyright infringement, which may be harder but comes with high statutory damages.
Howard King, the lawyer for Shakur’s estate, lays out the issue in his cease-and-desist letter to Drake. “Not only is the record a flagrant violation of Tupac’s publicity and the estate’s legal rights,” King writes, “it is also a blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time. The Estate would never have given its approval for this use.” The use of 2Pac’s voice was especially inappropriate, King suggests, since Lamar is “a good friend to the Estate who has given nothing but respect to Tupac.”
In music critic terms, Drake is using simulacra of 2Pac and Snoop to call out Lamar by implying that he’s unworthy of their legacy. In legal terms, this might violate Shakur and Snoop Dogg’s rights of publicity or likeness rights, and there are precedents that would suggest it does — Tom Waits and Bette Midler each won a case about (human) vocal imitation. In moral terms, this feels so wrong because it forces Shakur and Snoop to say something they would never have said in real life. In hip-hop, reputation is everything — you own your words in both senses of the term — and Snoop and Shakur have every right to guard theirs.
This might seem like an awfully pretentious way to talk about what will almost certainly be remembered as a minor track from a major artist. Are reputations really at stake? Doesn’t anyone with even the slightest interest in pop music know that Drake used AI?
That’s a very current way of thinking about a technology that’s evolving really fast. What happens when millions of hobbyist producers release thousands of songs with imitations of hundreds of artists? (There are fan-made AI tracks out there already.) Who’s to know who dissed whom, let alone who favors what politician or endorses which product? For that matter, what happens when this comes for politicians? You can’t regulate digital technology with the legal equivalent of an umbrella — you need to prepare for a flood.
The ELVIS Act and the EU AI legislation represent a good start for that preparation, and most of the federal legislation under discussion seems solid. Hopefully, by the time the flood hits, we’ll remember “Heart on My Sleeve” as the beginning of an important debate and “Taylor Made Freestyle” as an amusing aside.
Tupac Shakur’s estate is threatening to sue Drake over a recent diss track against Kendrick Lamar that featured an AI-generated version of the late rapper’s voice, calling it a “a flagrant violation” of the law and a “blatant abuse” of his legacy.
In a Wednesday cease-and-desist letter obtained exclusively by Billboard, litigator Howard King told Drake (Aubrey Drake Graham) that he must confirm that he will pull down his “Taylor Made Freestyle” in less than 24 hours or the estate would “pursue all of its legal remedies” against him.
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“The Estate is deeply dismayed and disappointed by your unauthorized use of Tupac’s voice and personality,” King wrote in the letter. “Not only is the record a flagrant violation of Tupac’s publicity and the estate’s legal rights, it is also a blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time. The Estate would never have given its approval for this use.”
Drake released “Taylor Made” on Friday, marking the latest chapter in a back-and-forth war of words between the Canadian rapper and Lamar. Beyond taking shots at both Kendrick and Taylor Swift, the track made headlines because of its prominent use of artificial intelligence technology to create fake verses from Tupac and Snoop Dogg – two West Coast legends idolized by the LA-based Lamar.
“Kendrick, we need ya, the West Coast savior/ Engraving your name in some hip-hop history,” the AI-generated Tupac raps in Drake’s song. “If you deal with this viciously/ You seem a little nervous about all the publicity.”
In Tuesday’s letter, Tupac’s estate warned Drake that the use of his voice clearly violated Tupac’s so-called publicity rights – the legal power to control how your image or likeness is used by others. And they took particular exception the use of his voice to take shots at Lamar.
“The unauthorized, equally dismaying use of Tupac’s voice against Kendrick Lamar, a good friend to the Estate who has given nothing but respect to Tupac and his legacy publicly and privately, compounds the insult,” King wrote.
A rep for Drake declined to comment on the demands of the Shakur estate.
It’s unclear if Snoop Dogg, whose voice was also featured on “Taylor Made,” is planning to raise similar legal objections to Drake’s track. On Saturday, he posted a video to social media in which he seemed to be learning of the song for the first time: “They did what? When? How? Are you sure?” A rep for Snoop Dogg did not return a request for comment.
The unauthorized use of voice cloning technology has become one of the music industry’s thorniest legal subjects, as AI-powered tools have made easier than ever to convincingly mimic real artists.
The issue exploded onto the scene last year, when an unknown artist named Ghostwriter released a track called “Heart On My Sleeve” that featured – ironically – fake verses from Drake’s voice. Since then, as voice-cloning has proliferated on the internet, industry groups, legal experts and lawmakers have wrangled over how best to crack down on it.
It’s not as simple as it might seem. Federal copyrights are difficult to directly apply, since cloned vocals usually feature new words and music that are distinct from existing copyrighted songs. The publicity rights cited by the estate are a better fit because they protect someone’s likeness itself, but they have historically been used to sue over advertisements, rather than over creative works like songs.
Faced with that legal uncertainty, the recording industry and top artists have pushed for new legislation to address the problem. Last month, Tennessee passed a statute called the ELVIS Act that aims to crack down on voice cloning by expanding the state’s publicity right laws beyond just advertisements. Lawmakers in Washington DC are also considering similar bills that would create new, broader publicity rights at a federal level.
In Wednesday’s letter, however, the estate said that California’s existing publicity right laws clearly outlaw something as blatant as Drake’s use of Tupac’s voice in “Taylor Made.” King argued that the song had caused “substantial economic and reputational harm” by creating the “false impression that the estate and Tupac promote or endorse the lyrics for the sound-alike.”
The estate also argued that the song was likely created using an AI model that violated the estate’s copyrights by “training” on existing recordings of Tupac’s music. The legality of using copyrighted “inputs” is another difficult legal issue that’s currently being tested in several closely-watched lawsuits against AI developers, including one filed by major music publishers.
“It is hard to believe that [Tupac’s record label]’s intellectual property was not scraped to create the fake Tupac AI on the Record,” King wrote, before demanding that Drake also provide “a detailed explanation for how the sound-alike was created and the persons or company that created it, including all recordings and other data ‘scraped’ or used.”
Wednesday’s letter also pointedly highlighted that Drake himself has made previous objections to the use of his own likeness by others. In addition to last year’s incident surrounding “Heart on My Sleeve” — which was quickly pulled down from the internet — King pointed to a lesser-known federal lawsuit in which Drake’s attorneys accused a website of using his image without authorization.
“The [“Taylor Made Freestyle”] has generated well more than one million streams at this point and has been widely reported in the general national press and popular entertainment websites and publications,” the estate wrote. “Without question, it is exponentially more serious and damaging than a picture of you with some other people on a low volume website.”
In its closing paragraphs, the letter demanded written confirmation by noon Pacific on Thursday that Drake’s representatives were “expeditiously taking all steps necessary to have it removed.”
“If you comply, the estate will consider whether an informal negotiation to resolve this matter makes sense,” King wrote. “If you do not comply, our client has authorized this firm to pursue all of its legal remedies including, but not limited to, an action for violation of … the estate’s copyright, publicity and personality rights and the resulting damages, injunctive relief, and punitive damages and attorneys’ fees.”