The debate around the use of AI in music shows no signs of abating.
I do believe our voices and likenesses need to be protected from bad actors using AI to make monetary gains for themselves
Now Sheryl Crow is having a go at Drake for attempting to resurrect Tupac Shakur through AI on a recent track of his.
You may recall that at the height of the Drake-Kendrick Lamar diss tracks kerfuffle in late April, Drake issued a sortie at Lamar, Taylor Made Freestyle, which used an AI-generated version of Tupac’s voice. The Shakur estate issued a swift cease and desist letter to the Toronto rapper and the track quickly disappeared into the digital ether. Albeit briefly...
Now, in an interview with the BBC, Crow has fumed: "You cannot bring people back from the dead and believe that they would stand for that.” "I'm sure Drake thought, 'Yeah, I shouldn't do it, but I'll say sorry later'. But it's already done, and people will find it even if he takes it down. It's hateful. It is antithetical to the life force that exists in all of us."
Crow said in the interview last year that she had had first-hand experience of the technology when she met a young songwriter last year who was using it in her work. Frustrated that male artists didn’t listen to her demos, Crow’s friend used an AI version of US singer-songwriter John Mayer to replace her own vocals.
She said that hearing it left her so “terrified” that she was “literally hyperventilating”. “I know John and I know the nuances of his voice,” she says. “And there would be no way you’d have been able to tell that he was not singing that song."
It’s a subject that’s been on her mind a lot recently and came up on her latest album, Evolution, which was released in March. On the title track she sings “Turned on the radio and there it was/A song that sounded like something I wrote/ The voice and melody were hauntingly/So familiar that I thought it was a joke.”
In May she penned a piece for the Hollywood Reporter in which she urged the US Congress to put safeguards in place so that AI is used ‘ethically’, writing: “I do believe our voices and likenesses need to be protected from bad actors using AI to make monetary gains for themselves.”
“But, it is not the money or loss of compensation that I worry about. Yes, it is wrong to manipulate any artist’s likeness, voice, words or art as their own but for me, it is the deception we are giving our approval to by not doing something to keep it from happening.”
Along with over 200 other artists she has signed the open letter the Artists Rights Alliance sent to tech firms calling on them not to develop AI systems that will ‘undermine or replace the human artistry of songwriters and artists or deny us fair compensation for our work.’ Other signatories include Rosanne Cash, Nicki Minaj and Sam Smith.
