ILast week, highly anticipated songs from Drake and Taylor Swift leaked online, sparking huge reactions. Huge Reddit Topics generated, dissecting musical choices. Meme videos were created simulating other rappers’ reactions to being snubbed by Drake. Rapper Rick Ross even responded to the song’s verses about him with a diss track of his own.
But there was one big problem: Neither Swift nor Drake confirmed that the songs were real. In fact, large contingents on social media claimed the songs were AI-generated hoaxes and begged other fans not to listen to them. Fervent fans soon became engulfed in furious hunts for clues and debates aimed at decoding the levels of authenticity of the songs.
These types of arguments have intensified recently and will continue to increase as vocal AI clones continue to improve and become more and more accessible to everyday people. These days, even an artist’s biggest fans have trouble distinguishing between their heroes and AI creations. They will continue to be thwarted in the coming months as the music industry and lawmakers slowly work to determine how best to protect human creators from artificial imposters.
The advent of AI deepfakes
AI first shook up the pop music world last year, when a song that sounded like it was by Drake and the Weekend called “Heart on My Sleeve” went viral, with millions of plays on TikTok, Spotify and YouTube. But it was soon revealed that the song was created by an anonymous musician called ghostwriter977, who used an AI-powered filter to transform his voice into the voice of both pop stars.
Many fans of both artists loved the song anyway and it was later uploaded to Grammy Consideration. And some artists have embraced the new deepfake technology, including Grimes, who has long experimented with technological advances and who developed a clone of his voice and then encouraged musicians to create music using it.
But similar sounds soon began to stir other artists’ fan bases. Many important stars such as Frank Oceano It is Beyonceresorted to intense policies of secrecy surrounding their production (Ocean transported on physical hard drives of their music to avoid leaks), resulting in desperate fans doing anything to try and get new music. This opened the door to scammers: last year, a scammer sold songs created by AI to Frank Ocean superfans for thousands of dollars. A few months later, snippets that were supposedly taken from new songs by Harry Styles and One Direction surfaced on the web, with fans also paying for them. But many fans argued vehemently that they were hoaxes. Not even AI analytics companies were able to determine if they were real, 404 Media reported.
See more information: AI’s influence on music is raising some difficult questions
Drake and Taylor… or not?
This week, AI shook up the fan bases of two of the world’s biggest pop stars: Taylor Swift and Drake. First came a snippet of Drake’s “Push Ups,” a track that seemingly responded to Kendrick Lamar’s digs at him in the song. “Like this.” (“Pipsqueak, pipe down,” went one line from “Push Ups.”) The track, which also took aim at Rick Ross, The Weeknd and Metro Boomin, quickly went viral, and Ross fired back a diss track Of himself.
But the internet was divided over whether or not the clip was actually made by Drake. The original leak was of poor quality; Drake’s vocals sound grainy and monotonous. Even rapper Joe Budden, who hosts the prominent hip-hop podcast Joe Budden Podcast, he said that he was “on the fence” for a while about whether or not it was AI.
A higher quality version of the song was later released, prompting many media outlets and social media posters to treat “push-ups” like a genuine Drake song. Oddly enough, Drake played with this ambiguity: he hasn’t yet claimed the song as his, but posted a story on Instagram containing people dancing parts of it. Whether he succeeded or not, the song became an unmistakable entry into a extensive rap meat who took the hip-hop world by storm.
“Push Ups” references Taylor Swift: It accuses Lamar of being so controlled by his record label that they ordered him to record a “verse for the Swifties” on the 2015 remix of her song “Bad Blood.” On Wednesday, Swifties went into a frenzy when she leaked a version of her highly anticipated new album, Department of Tortured Poets, began circulating online two days before the release date. Alleged leaks have been emerging for months, including some that were eventually debunked as AI-generated. Given all the red herrings on the web, many Swift fans considered these new leaks to be false as well. But the songs are also being treated as real by lots of fans on Redditwho are already announcing their favorite tracks and moments a day before the album’s official release.
See more information: Everything we know about Taylor Swift’s new album Department of Tortured Poets
Can the music industry react?
Some of these vocal deepfakes are nothing more than a nuisance for big artists because they are low quality and easy to detect. AI tools often have the slightly wrong timbre of a distinctive voice and can fail when performers use melisma – sliding up and down on a single syllable – or suddenly jump in registers. Some pronunciations of the lyrics are also distorted or with a slightly wrong accent.
But AI tools are constantly improving and getting closer to reality. OpenAI recently shared a preview of Voice engine, its latest tool that generates natural-sounding speech by imitating certain speakers. AI researchers and companies are racing to create voice clone detection software, but their success rates were unequal.
Therefore, some musicians and record labels are reacting with the avenues available to them. Three major music publishers – Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO – have sued AI company Anthropic, alleging that the company infringed on copyrighted song lyrics. More than 200 musicians, including Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder and Nicki Minaj, recently signed a letter condemning the “predatory use of AI to steal voices and images from professional artists.” And BPI, a UK music industry group, threat of legal action against the vocal cloning service Jammable.
The music industry has growing support from lawmakers. Last month, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed into law ELVIS Act, which prohibits people from using AI to imitate an artist’s voice without their permission. And US senators announced a similar bill called Law NO FAKES. “We must establish rules of the road to protect people from having their voices and images replicated through AI without their permission,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. wrote in a statement.
It will likely take a long time for this bill or others like it to reach the halls of Congress. Even if one of them is approved, it will be extremely difficult to enforce, given the anonymity of many of these online posters and the propensity for deleted songs to resurface in the form of unlicensed copies. So it’s almost certain that deepfaked songs will continue to excite, confuse and anger music fans in the months and years to come.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
