The Weeknd and Drake/Twitter @DailyLoud
AI songs have been the rave in recent weeks. Covers of songs by deep fakes of your favorite artist have been popping up all over social media. Among this is an AI-generated song by The Weeknd and Drake called “Heart On The Sleeve” that blew up this weekend. The song has over 250,000 views on Spotify and 10 million on TikTok.
The song is credited to an artist going by ghost-writer and both of the recorded artists have nothing to do with it. It was entirely generated by AI and it sounds pretty good. Both artists are yet to comment on the song. Drake recently got it in with an AI cover of himself on Ice Spice’s “Munch”. He posted a comment about the cover on his Instagram story saying,” This is the final straw AI.” It is possible this was him joining in the fun but this isn’t the first time artist has had problems with deep fake songs.
Last week, Eminem fell prey to deep fake songs. There was an AI song on YouTube with him rapping about cats. UMG, his label reps, issued copywriting strikes on the song. A similar thing has in 2020 when Roc Nation copywrite struck AI-deep fake Jay–Z videos on YouTube. The content was later reinstated by YouTube.
As it stands, Copyright law hasn’t caught up enough to have specific guides for AI content. In the legal code’s existing state, transformative parody is permissible. These laws regarding transformative works are very subjective. UMG has already taken action against AI-generated songs that rips off their recording artist. UMG asked streaming services to prevent AI companies from using its music to train their models.
In some instances, taking out the resources from the models will not be that easy. Something similar happened when Dungeons & Dragons artworks creator, Greg Rutkowski’s style was the one most similar style replicated when Stable Diffusion was launched in September. Rutkowski never permitted his work to be used by the AI models. Until there are some regulations on these AIs, it will be a wild wild west out here.
You can check out the song here.
