Last month, a video of Harry Styles covering a song from 2003 Disney film The Lizzie McGuire Movie went viral on TikTok. Except Styles has never – at least not publicly, or to anyone’s knowledge – performed this song. Instead, it joins the many examples of fake performances created by artificial intelligence.
Fans were delighted. “Suddenly I am no longer afraid of AI,” commented one listener, and on videos of other AI-generated Styles songs (he’s made to duet with Taylor Swift, for example) there are multiple requests for more. “Make him sing take me to church [by Hozier],” writes one fan, and “SING SAD GIRL BY LANA [del Rey]”, bellows another. Fans wanting their favourite artists to cover songs they enjoy is hardly a new phenomenon, but with advances in AI, there’s no need to involve the artist at all.
