deepfake
FKA Twigs is slated to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property on Tuesday afternoon (April 30) to warn members of Congress about the dangers of the unsanctioned use of artificial intelligence to mimic an artist’s unique style and delivery.
The singer/dancer will also reveal that she has been developing a deepfake of herself over the past year in a bid to explore using AI to help with marketing and streamlining the creative process, as well as to head off anyone else beating her to the AI punch.
“As a future-facing artist, new technologies are an exciting tool that can be used to expressdeeper emotions, create fantasy worlds, and touch the hearts of many people,” she will tell the committee, which will also hear from Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl. Her appearance in D.C. is in support of the Senate’s bipartisan Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (“NO FAKES Act”) draft proposal, aimed at protecting Americans from nonconsensual AI-generated deepfakes and creating federal-level rules to protect an individual’s voice and image from being used in harmful AI-generated content.
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Her testimony — provided to Billboard ahead of her appearance — will open with the 36-year-old artist describing a life spent immersed in the arts, including the ballet, singing and acting lessons her dancer mother and stepdad dance company director sacrificed to provide for her. “From the age of 16, I began to explore both dance and music as a career, and that interest in multiple disciplines has defined my life for the past two decades both personally and professionally,” she will tell the committee.
The Grammy-nominated singer and recent soloist with the acclaimed Martha Graham Dance Company — and co-star in an upcoming adaptation of The Crow — will tell the committee that she wanted to testify because “my music, my dancing, my acting, the way that my body moves in front of a camera and the way that my voice resonates through a microphone is not by chance; they are essential reflections of who I am. My art is the canvas on which I paint my identity and the sustaining foundation of my livelihood. It is the essence of my being.”
All of that, however, is under threat, she testifies, noting that while AI can’t replicate the depth of her journey, “those who control it hold the power to mimic the likeness of my art, to replicate it and falsely claim my identity and intellectual property. This prospect threatens to rewrite and unravel the fabric of my very existence. We must enact regulation now to safeguard our authenticity and protect against misappropriation of our inalienable rights.”
At a time when bootleg AI songs claiming to feature the voices of major stars such as The Weeknd are proliferating — including the Drake AI freestyle diss track “Taylor Made” with computer-generated voices of Snoop Dogg and the late Tupac Shakur that was removed after a lawsuit threat from Shakur’s estate — Twigs says that the progenitors of the internet could not have predicted three decades ago how integral, and sometimes dangerous, it would become to our lives.
“AI is the biggest leap in technological advancement since the internet. You know the saying ‘Fool me once, shame on you… Fool me twice, shame on me,’” she says. “If we make the same mistakes with the emergence of AI, it will be ‘shame on us.’”
Having gleefully embraced technology throughout her career, Twigs will describe her bespoke deepfake, which she trained in the quirks of her personality and tuned to the exact tone of her voice to speak in several languages. “I will be engaging my AI twigs later this year to extend my reach and handle my online social media interactions, whilst I continue to focus on my art from the comfort and solace of my studio,” she says.
“These and similar emerging technologies are highly valuable tools both artistically and commercially when under the control of the artist,” she tells the committee. “What is not acceptable is when my art and my identity can simply be taken by a third party and exploited falsely for their own gain without my consent due to the absence of appropriate legislative control.”
Noting that history is littered with the stories of artists being the first ones to be exploited during moments of great technological advance, Twigs will warn that the “general and more vulnerable public” are often next. “By protecting artists with legislation at such a momentous moment in our history we are protecting a five-year-old child in the future from having their voice, likeness and identity taken and used as a commodity without prior consent, attribution or compensation,” she says.
Her testimony includes a plea to the committee to help protect artists and their work from the dangers of AI exploitation, speaking on behalf of fellow creators whose careers depend on the ability to create with the knowledge that they can maintain “tight control” over their “art, image, voice and identity.”
“Our careers and livelihoods are in jeopardy, and so potentially are the wider image-related rights of others in society,” she says. “You have the power to change this and safeguard the future. As artists and, more importantly, human beings, we are a facet of our given, learned, and developed identity. Our creativity is the product of this lived experience overlaid with years of dedication to qualification, training, hard work and, dare I say it, significant financial investment and sacrifice. That the very essence of our being at its most human level can be violated by the unscrupulous use of AI to create a digital facsimile that purports to be us, and our work, is inherently wrong.”
The testimony will end with an urgent plea, as well as a dire warning: “We must get this right … you must get this right,” she says. “Now… before it is too late.”
In January, a bipartisan group of U.S. House lawmakers announced a bill aimed at regulating the use of AI for cloning voices and likenesses, the No AI FRAUD Act, which could establish a federal framework for protecting one’s voice and likeness while laying out First Amendment protections.
Tennessee governor Bill Lee signed the ELVIS Act into law Thursday (Mar. 21), legislation designed to further protect the state’s artists from artificial intelligence deep fakes. The bill, more formally named the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act of 2024, replaces the state’s old right of publicity law, which only included explicit protections for one’s “name, photograph, or likeness,” expanding protections to include voice- and AI-specific concerns for the first time.
Gov. Lee signed the bill into law from a local honky tonk, surrounded by superstar supporters like Luke Bryan and Chris Janson. Lee joked that it was “the coolest bill signing ever.”
The ELVIS Act was introduced by Gov. Lee in January along with State Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R-27) and House Majority Leader William Lambert (R-44), and it has since garnered strong support from the state’s artistic class. Talents like Lindsay Ell, Michael W. Smith, Natalie Grant, Matt Maher and Evanescence‘s David Hodges have been vocal in their support for the bill.
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It also gained support from the recorded music industry and the Human Artistry Campaign, a global initiative of entertainment organizations that pushes for a responsible approach to AI. The initiative has buy-in from more than 180 organizations worldwide, including the RIAA, NMPA, BMI, ASCAP, Recording Academy and American Association of Independent Music (A2IM).
Right of publicity protections vary state-to-state in the United States, leading to a patchwork of laws that make enforcing one’s ownership over one’s name, likeness and voice more complicated. There is an even greater variation among right of publicity laws postmortem. As AI impersonation concerns have grown more prevalent over the last year, there has been a greater push by the music business to gain a federal right of publicity.
The ELVIS Act replaces the Personal Rights Protection Act of 1984, which was passed, in part, to extend Elvis Presley‘s publicity rights after he passed away. (At the time, Tennessee did not recognize a postmortem right of publicity). Along with explicitly including a person’s voice as a protected right for the first time, the ELVIS Act also broadens which uses of one’s name, image, photograph and voice are barred.
Previously, the Personal Rights Protection Act only banned uses of a person’s name, photograph and likeness “for purpose of advertising,” which would not include the unauthorized use of AI voices for performance purposes. The ELVIS Act does not limit liability based on context, so it would likely bar any unauthorized use, including in a documentary, song or book, among other mediums.
The federal government is also working on solutions to address publicity rights concerns. Within hours of Gov. Lee’s introduction of the ELVIS Act in Tennessee back in January, a bipartisan group of U.S. House lawmakers revealed the No Artificial Intelligence Fake Replicas And Unauthorized Duplications Act (No AI FRAUD Act), which aims to establish a framework for protecting one’s voice and likeness on a federal level and lays out First Amendment protections. It is said to complement the Senate’s Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act (NO FAKES Act), a draft bill that was introduced last October.
While most of the music business is aligned on creating a federal right of publicity, David Israelite, president/CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), warned in a speech delivered at an Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP) meeting in February that “while we are 100% supportive of the record labels’ priority to get a federal right of publicity…it does not have a good chance. Within the copyright community, we don’t even agree on [it]. Guess who doesn’t want a federal right of publicity? Film and TV. Guess who’s bigger than the music industry? Film and TV.”
The subject of AI voice cloning has been a controversial topic in the music business since Ghostwriter released the so-called “Fake-Drake” song “Heart On My Sleeve,” which used the AI technology without permission. In some cases, this form of AI can present novel creative opportunities — including its use for pitch records, lyric translations, estate marketing and fan engagement — but it also poses serious threats. If an artist’s voice is cloned by AI without their permission or knowledge, it can confuse, offend, mislead or even scam fans.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X has restored searches for Taylor Swift after temporarily blocking users from seeing some results as pornographic deepfake images of the singer circulated online. Searches for the singer’s name on the site Tuesday turned up a list of tweets as normal. A day earlier, the same search resulted in an […]
What if we had the power to bring back the dead? As far as recordings are concerned, we might be getting pretty close.
The viral success of the so-called “Fake Drake” track “Heart on My Sleeve,” which apparently employed AI technology to create realistic renderings of vocals from Drake and The Weeknd without their knowledge, has raised the possibility that perhaps any voice can now be imitated by AI, even artists who died decades ago.
Last week, producer Timbaland did just that. “I always wanted to work with BIG, and I never got a chance to. Until today…” he said in an Instagram Reel, pressing play on an unreleased song clip that sounds like Notorious BIG, rapping on top of a Timbaland beat, despite the fact that the rapper was murdered in a drive-by shooting 25 years prior. (A representative for Timbaland did not respond to Billboard’s request for comment. A representative for Notorious BIG’s estate declined to comment).
But this is not the first time a deceased stars’ voice has been resurrected with AI. The HYBE-owned AI voice synthesis company Supertone recreated the voice of late-South Korean folk artist Kim Kwang-seok last year, and in November, Tencent’s Lingyin Engine made headlines for developing “synthetic voices in memory of legendary artists,” like Teresa Teng and Anita Mui. To see more even examples of this technology applied to late American singers, take a few minutes on TikTok, searching phrases like “Kurt Cobain AI cover” or “XXXTentacion AI voice.”
Some artists – like Grimes and Holly Herndon – have embraced the idea of this vocal recreation technology, finding innovative ways to grant fans access to their voices while maintaining some control through their own AI models, but other artists are showing signs that they will resist this, fearing that the technology could lead to confusion over which songs they actually recorded. There is also fear that fans will put words into artists’ mouths, making them voice phrases and opinions that they would never say IRL. Even Grimes admitted on Twitter there is the possibility that people will use her voice to say “rly rly toxic lyrics” or “nazi stuff” – and said she’d take those songs down.
In the case of artists like Notorious BIG or Kurt Cobain, who both passed away when the internet was still something you had to dial-up, it’s impossible to know where they might stand on this next-gen technology. Still, their voices are being resurrected through AI, and it seems these vocals are getting more realistic by the day.
It calls to mind the uncanny valley nature of the Tupac hologram which debuted at Coachella in 2012, or even the proliferation of posthumous albums in more recent years, which are especially common to see from artists who passed away suddenly at a young age, like Juice WRLD, Lil Peep, and Mac Miller.
Tyler, the Creator has voiced what many others have felt about the posthumous album trend. At an April 26 concert in Los Angeles, he noted that he’s written it into his will that he does not want any unreleased music put out after his death. “That’s f-cking gross,” he said. “Like, half-ass ideas and some random feature on it…like no.” It remains unclear if Tyler’s dying wishes would be honored when that time comes, however. Labels often own every song recorded during the term of their contract with an artist, so there is financial incentive for labels to release those unheard records.
Some who look at this optimistically liken the ability to render an artists’ voice onto a cover or original track as an emerging, novel form of fan engagement, similar to remixing, sampling, or even writing fan fiction. Similar to where this new technology seems to be headed, remixes and samples also both started as unsanctioned creations. Those reworkings were often less about making songs that would go toe-to-toe with the original artists’ catalog on the Billboard charts than it was about creativity and playfulness. Of course, there were plenty of legal issues that came along with the emergence of both remixing and sampling.
The legality of bringing artists’ voices back from the grave specifically is also still somewhat unclear. A celebrity’s voice may be covered by “right of publicity” laws which can protect them from having their voices commercially exploited without authorization. However, publicity rights post-mortem can be limited. “There’s no federal rights of publicity statute, just a hodgepodge of different state laws,” says Josh Love, partner at Reed Smith. He explains that depending on where the artist was domiciled at the time of their death, their estate may not possess any rights of publicity, but in states like California, there can be strong protection after death.
Another potential safeguard is the Lanham Act – which prohibits the use of any symbol or device that is likely to deceive consumers about the association, sponsorship, or approval of goods and services — though it may be less of a potent argument post-mortem. But most cases in which rights of publicity or the Lanham Act were used to protect a musician’s voice – like Tom Waits v. Frito Lay and Bette Midler v. Ford – were clear examples of voices being appropriated for commercial use. Creative works, like songs, are much more likely to be deemed a protected form of free speech.
Some believe this could be a particularly interesting new path for reviving older catalogs, especially when the artist is not alive to take part in any more promotion, for the estates and rights holders who control the artists’ likeness. As Zach Katz, president and COO of FaZe Clan and former president of BMG US, put it in a recent press release for voice mapping service Covers.ai: “AI will open a new, great opportunity for more legacy artists and catalogs to have their ‘Kate Bush’ or “Fleetwood Mac’ moment,” he said. “We are living in a remix culture and the whole fan-music movement is overdue to arrive in the industry.”
Though Covers.ai, created by start-up MAYK, was only just released to the public today, May 10, the company announced that it already amassed over 100,000 sign ups for the service leading up to its launch, proving that there is a strong appetite for this technology. With Covers.ai, users can upload original songs and map someone else’s voice on top of it, and the company says it is working to partner with the music business to license and pay for these voices. Its co-founder and CEO, Stefan Heinrich, says this idea is especially popular so far with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, “the product we’re building here is really made for the next generation, the one coming up.”
Between Supertone, Lingyin Engine, Covers.ai, and others competitors like Uberduck coming into the marketplace, it seems the popularization of these AI voice synthesizers is inevitable (albeit legally uncertain) but playing with dead artists’ voices adds another layer of moral complexity to the discussion: is this more akin to paying respects or grave robbing?
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