A.I. laying down some tracks:
"For Drake and the Weeknd, two of the most popular musicians on the planet, the existence of “Heart on My Sleeve,” a track that claimed to use A.I. versions of their voices to create a passable mimicry, may have qualified as a minor nuisance — a short-lived novelty that was easily stamped out by their powerful record company.
But for others in the industry, the song — which became
a viral curio on social media, racking up millions of plays across TikTok, Spotify, YouTube and more before it was removed this week — represented something more serious: a harbinger of the headaches that can occur when a new technology crosses over into the mainstream consciousness of creators and consumers before the necessary rules are in place.
“Heart on My Sleeve” was the latest and loudest example of a gray-area genre that has exploded in recent months: homemade tracks that use generative artificial intelligence technology, in part or in full, to conjure familiar sounds that can be passed off as authentic, or at least close enough. It earned instant comparisons to earlier technologies that disrupted the music industry, including the dawn of the synthesizer, the sampler and the file-sharing service Napster.
Yet while
A.I. Rihanna singing a Beyoncé song or
A.I. Kanye West doing “Hey There Delilah” may seem like a harmless lark, the successful (if brief) arrival of “Heart on My Sleeve” on official streaming services, complete with shrewd online marketing from its anonymous creator, intensified alarms that were already ringing in the music business, where
corporations have grown concerned about A.I. models learning from, and then diluting, their copyrighted material."