State Champ Radio fake drake
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?
For the last week, the most talked-about song in the music business has been “Heart on My Sleeve,” the track said to have been created by using artificial intelligence to imitate vocals from Drake and The Weeknd and uploaded to TikTok by the user Ghostwriter977. And while most reactions were impressed, there was a big difference between those of fans (“This isn’t bad, which is pretty cool!”) and executives (“This isn’t bad, which is really scary!”). As with much online technology, however, what’s truly remarkable, and frightening, isn’t the quality – it’s the potential quantity.
This particular track didn’t do much damage. Streaming services pulled it down after receiving a request from Universal Music Group, for which both Drake and The Weeknd record. YouTube says the track was removed because of a copyright claim, and “Heart on My Sleeve” contains at least one obvious infringement in the form of a Metro Boomin producer tag. But it’s not as clear as creators and rightsholders might like that imitating Drake’s voice qualifies as copyright infringement.
In a statement released around the time the track was taken down, Universal said that “the training of generative AI using our artists’ music” violated copyright. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Whether that’s true in the U.S. depends on whether training AI with music qualifies as fair use – which will not be clear until courts rule on the matter. Whether it’s true in other countries depends on local statutory exceptions for text and data mining that vary in every country. Either way, though, purposefully imitating Drake’s voice would almost certainly violate his right to what an American lawyer might call his right of publicity but a fan would more likely call his artistic identity. There are precedents for this: A court held that Frito-Lay violated the rights of Tom Waits by imitating his voice for a commercial, and Bette Midler won a similar lawsuit against Ford. Both of those cases involved an implied endorsement – the suggestion of approval where none existed.
The violation of an AI imitation is far more fundamental, though. The essence of Drake’s art – the essence of his Drakeness, if you will – is his voice. (That voice isn’t great by any technical definition, any more than Tom Waits’ is, but it’s a fundamental part of his creativity, even his very identity.) Imitating that is fair enough when it comes to parody – this video of takes on Bob Dylan‘s vocal style seems like it should be fair game because it’s commenting on Dylan instead of ripping him off – but creating a counterfeit Drake might be even more of a moral violation than a commercial one. Bad imitators may be tacky, but people tend to regard very accurate ones as spooky. “Heart on My Sleeve” isn’t Drake Lite so much as an early attempt at Drakenstein – interesting to look at, but fundamentally alarming in the way it imitates humanity. (Myths and stories return to this theme all the time, and it’s hard to think of many with happy endings.) Universal executives know that – they have talked internally about the coming challenges of AI for years – which is why the company’s comment asked stakeholders “which side of history” they want to be on.
This track is just the sign of a coming storm. The history of technology is filled with debates about when new forms of media and technology will surpass old ones in terms of quality when it often matters much more about how cheap and easy they are. No one thinks movies look better on a phone screen than in a theatre, but the device is right there in your hand. Travel agents might be better at booking flights than Expedia, but – well, the fact that there aren’t that many of them anymore makes my point. Here, the issue isn’t whether AI can make a Drake track better than Drake – which is actually impossible by definition, because a Drake track without Drake isn’t really a Drake track at all – but rather how much more productive AI can be than human artists, and what happens once it starts operating at scale.
Imagine the most prolific artist you can think of – say, an insomniac YoungBoy Never Broke Again crossed with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Then imagine that this hypothetical artist never needs to eat or sleep or do anything else that interferes with work. Then imagine that he – or, really, it – never varies from a proven commercial formula. Now clone that artist thousands of times. Because that’s the real threat of AI to the music business – not the quality that could arrive someday but the quantity that’s coming sooner than we can imagine.
It has been said that 100,000 tracks get uploaded to streaming services every day. What happens once algorithms can make pop music at scale? Will that turn into a million tracks a day? Or 100 million? Could music recorded by humans become an exception instead of a rule? In the immediate future, most of this music wouldn’t be very interesting – but the sheer scale and inevitable variety could cut into the revenue collected by creators and rightsholders. The music business doesn’t need an umbrella – it needs a flood barrier.
In the long run, that barrier should be legal – some combination of copyright, personality rights and unfair competition law. That will take time to build, though. For now, streaming services need to continue to work with creators and rightsholders to make clear the difference between artists and their artificial imitators.
Fans who want to hear Drake shouldn’t have to guess which songs are really his.
For the Record is a regular column from deputy editorial director Robert Levine analyzing news and trends in the music industry. Find more here.
-
Pages
