A.I. Is Now Coming For Music And Is Capable Of Mimicking Your Favorite Artist To The Point You Can't Even Tell If It's Actually Them Or Not, Causing Labels And Artists Like Drake To Freak Out On How To Handle It
All New Hip Hop- AAs record labels and streaming services team up to combat AI, there’s a polarizing reaction from artists and fans alike. Artists like Drake, Kanye West, Rihanna, and many others have had their voices sampled to processed through AI generators. We can’t lie, these Kanye AI covers are refreshing. However, it still breeds concerns surrounding the future of music. Industry experts, artists, and executives expressed the need to address the issues surrounding ethics. Meanwhile, it also spurs questions surrounding how musicians will further generate revenue when technology can seemingly replace them within seconds. Some might embrace the future of technology but others feel like this could lead to the worse.
Of course, the most popular artists have become the easiest to duplicate. One guy went viral for using AI to create his own Kendrick Lamar songs.
I’ll post the rest of the Kendrick AI tracks in the p.s. since there are so many. But here are a few.
Another person uploaded AI covers of Rihanna performing renditions of songs from Maroon 5 and Beyoncé.
And a recently viral cover of an AI Drake performing Ice Spice’s “Munch” got twitter going crazy.
Fans have been stunned by the uncanny resemblance to his voice and the uber-sassy bars coming from Drizzy.
Universal Music, who reportedly inked Drake to a “Lebron-sized deal,” recently put in a request to streaming services to prevent AI-generated covers from landing on their platforms. This later caught the attention of Drake, who finally responded to the cover of Ice Spice’s “Munch.” Drizzy appears to be baffled by the whole thing, writing, “This the final straw AI.” He clearly isn’t amused by hearing his own voice calling another man a munch, even if he was an early supporter of the Bronx Baddie’s breakout record.
The Financial Times first reported Universal Music’s request to Spotify and Apple to prevent AI covers from emerging on DSPs. Universal said they have a “moral and commercial responsibility to our artists.” With the proliferation of AI, they said they have to stop DSPs from “ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators.” “We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists,” their rep added.
David Guetta also had the balls to play a track he made using aa fake Eminem AI vocal on it at one of his shows.
He went on to describe how easy the process is, which is pretty fuckin scary.
“There’s something I made as a joke, and it worked so [well] I could not believe it! I discovered [these] websites that are about AI. Basically, you can write lyrics in any artist’s style. So I typed ‘write a verse in the style of Eminem about Future Rave,’ and I went to another AI website that can recreate the voice. I put the text in that, and I played the record, and people went nuts,” the Grammy-nominated artist explained.
Guetta didn’t reveal which ones he used, but some people believed that he used ChatGPT to write the lyrics and FakeYou or Uberduck for the sound manipulation. The musician clarified that he has no plans to commercially release the track, but he claims that AI is going to be the next big thing in the EDM scene.
Well, this is fucking wild.
It started a few weeks ago with the Kanye one that the Barstool account posted (at the top of the blog), and this Jay Z one.
Then more people started pumping out more Kanye ones.
And even though this shit isn't "real", it's still pretty good. Which is really fucked up to think.
What’s crazy is this has been whispered about and speculated for quite some time. We talked about it on last week's BARSTOOL BACKSTAGE podcast, but I heard an urban legend like 5-6 years back that The Chainsmokers had somebody on their production team who had "cracked the code" on some algorithm that knew the exact formula to create a track in just the right key, tempo, and style to make it an earworm. And that they were using machine learning to their advantage big time.
There was also this now very relevant clip from WIll.I.Am speaking in a Black Eyed Peas video from 2010…
Obviously, this is an entirely new landscape the music industry is going to have to face. Given how they've handled changing technology and adapting to the times in the past, we can bet the house they will find a way to fuck this up as well.
My big question is this- and I posed it to White Sox Dave on the podcast - say you were listening to your Spotify radio, and it started getting into the suggested "for you" stuff, and you heard a song that really caught your attention, so you pulled up because you didn't recognize the band, and favorited it. You clicked on the band to see what else they had and began listening to their entire tracklist. The songs just got better and better, and before you knew it, you had fallen in love with a new band, you thought you had discovered. You began sending it out to all your friends, telling them, "You have to hear this song and this band that I just found. They're amazing!"
One of your friends replies back that they just googled them and sends you a link that says they are an AI-Generated "band" created and owned by Sony Music and are "the new wave" of the future of music".
How do you feel?
Is the music still technically good in your eyes? Because "good music is good music"?
Or is it now trash because there's nothing human about it whatsoever?
Very conflicting. Tune in to see what our crew thought.
p.s. - this is a fucking nutso concept to picture. and I don't wanna hear it. everyone else, including elon, are now coming around saying artificial intelligence is too dangerous and we're fucking ourselves letting it get this powerful, but I've been banging that drum, screaming it from the heavens for years now.
p.p.s. - here's the other Kendrick tracks