A collab by Canadian superstars Drake and The Weeknd, referencing the latter’s ex-girlfriend, the singer and actress Selena Gomez? Hand me that juice. Except, it’s not what it seems, dammit. Last Sunday an original track, heart on my sleeve, appeared online, uploaded by an anonymous artist known only as ghostwriter. The vocals sounded uncannily like the above, but, ghostwriter explained in a TikTok video, had been made so with AI. As you might expect, it rapidly went viral.
Apart from a tediously insistent piano line that sounds like it’s played by an angry seven-year-old, it’s actually not awful — but that makes it even scarier. If you didn’t know it was AI, you might easily be fooled into thinking this ‘fake’ is the real thing.
The immediate response of Drake’s label, Universal Music Group, which was to swiftly demand its removal from the major streaming services on copyright grounds, and ask them to block AI users from using the label’s music to train their tech, indicates how seriously they are taking this infringement on their ability (and that of the artists) to make money.
As for the anonymous creator, “I was a ghostwriter for years and got paid close to nothing just for major labels to profit. The future is here,” the artist wrote. The game is on, it seems.
The affair, and other recent AI releases such as the one David Guetta posted (but did not release commercially) using an Eminem-style vocal on a verse generated by ChatGPT, throw a harsh light on the law’s ability to keep up with new technologies. Nothing is cut and dried here, and in this country we don’t even have the kind of strong “personality” laws that, in the US, protect you against the use of your image, your likeness or your name, let alone your voice.
The most likely route to legally challenge the creation of this kind of ‘fake’ is to argue that each time a song is fed into an AI engine in order for it to learn, that constitutes making a copy, which infringes the owner’s copyright.
In the meantime, though, the AI ‘fakes’ proliferate. And it’s alarming. The problem isn’t that AI might “replace” human artists. Our love of music comes from its inherent humanity; good music is as much about the human emotion and experience behind it as the sound. The worry is that artists who make the good stuff won’t be able to keep going long enough to make an impact because it’s so hard for musicians to make money in the era of streaming.
At the moment the AI tracks are largely being flagged by their creators to create precisely this kind of talking point, but how long before that stops and they monetise these releases, profiting from another artist’s creative endeavours, or damaging that artistic reputation?
We’re on the brink of legal chaos. Who will be bold enough to halt it?
Spare us the balloon ride splurge
Despite childishly regular flights of fancy about winning the lottery (usually when walking down one of London’s more desirable streets, i.e. not mine), I have come to the realisation that I’d be a rubbish rich person.
I don’t have the true, platinum-standard spendy knack that assumes I deserve this exclusive experience and damn the cost.
The news today that a French company plans to offer a Michelin-starred dinner in a “luxury pressurised capsule” floating serenely on the edge of the stratosphere for a cool £105,000 appals me. Quite apart from the horrifying combination of being trapped in that hushed, reverent atmosphere while someone explains fish to you, and the literal lack of atmosphere outside the window, I cannot imagine spending such cash on anything smaller or less useful than a house, even if I had it to spare. Lucky escape, that.
