It’s a success that Canadian artists Drake and The Weeknd would have done well without. Since Friday, April 14, a music video posted on the TikTok network has enjoyed remarkable success. Entitled Heart On My Sleeve, we recognize the voices of the two singers. The song refers to singer and actress Selena Gomez, with whom The Weeknd had a brief romantic relationship.
Problem, neither of the two stars participated in the recording of this title. The work is the result of an artificial intelligence (AI), which managed to imitate their voice and their style. Behind this tour de force, only one name appears: that of the pseudonym used by the TikTok user who published the video and calls himself Ghostwriter977. The video has generated nearly 10 million views. The title has also been published on other platforms (YouTube, Spotify), where it has been consulted several hundred thousand times.
This episode demonstrates that the music industry is not immune to the revolution in generative AI technologies, made famous with the success of software such as ChatGPT, capable of creating natural language text, realistic images or lines of code.
“Protect our rights and those of our artists”
In the music sector, the intrusion of these technologies raises the question of respect for intellectual property. In view of the success achieved by Heart On My SleeveUniversal Music Group (UMG), the record company of Drake and The Weeknd – two heavyweights in its catalog – reacted quickly to denounce “a violation of copyright law”and obtained the online removal of these contents.
The episode “raises the question as to which side of the story stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on”develops UMG. “On the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of counterfeits, fraud and denial to artists of their fair compensation. »
On April 12, the FinancialTimes already revealed that UMG had called on the major online music platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) in March to ask them to prevent AI services from sucking up their music to train their algorithms, threatening: “We will not hesitate to take action to protect our rights and those of our artists. »
However, should the use of artificial intelligence be prohibited in music? Some voices are already raised against such a radical position. Like Frenchman David Guetta, who used an AI tool to write a song whose lyrics reproduced the style of American rapper Eminem, and another that allowed him to imitate his voice. “It was a joke at first, but it works so well”he explained in February, while specifying that this experience had no commercial ambition.
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