Let all of us artists embrace our AI overlords and profit off their brilliance!
Last week, new songs from Drake and The Weeknd went viral. That’s not a surprise — both of those artists are some of the most popular in the world. The surprise was that neither of the songs was actually created by the artists themselves — they were both generated by artificial intelligence.
The Drake song sounded especially good. If I had not known going in that AI had synthesized Drake’s voice, I would have been fooled into thinking it was a legitimate new single from the artist. I also showed the song to a few people without explaining it was made by AI and none of them figured it out until I had explained it to them.
That goes to show how good AI is already getting at not only creating music, by dropping lyrics from our favorite singers on top of it. While a lot of artists and labels are pushing back against the technology and forcing takedowns of AI-generated songs online, some are embracing the new era of music creation.
Grimes has now come out saying that she is embracing the technology and is actually encouraging people to make AI-generated music using her voice. The artist has pledged to work on a process that will allow these producers to earn 50% of revenue from songs that they have created using the artist’s voice. Grimes, or Grimes’ label, will take the other 50% of revenue.
Incredibly, the artist has already had to quickly implement some loose content moderation rules, saying that users can’t use her voice with certain kinds of lyrics that she doesn’t want to be associated with. It’s not surprising, but it is a crazy thing to think that artists are now going to have to do content moderation on AI-generated songs using their voices. Everything is just content moderation problems now.
