Caroline Baudry with AFP / (Photo credit: HANNES P ALBERT / DPA / DPA PICTURE-ALLIANCE VIA AFP)
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8:12 p.m., April 19, 2023
A Drake and The Weeknd music video posted on Tiktok titled “Heart On My Sleeve” has garnered over 10 million views. The problem ? This song was created from scratch by an artificial intelligence. The use of AI in music is a subject of debate in the music industry, with some denouncing the legal abuses it entails.
A fake track by Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd has garnered millions of streams online since its release on Friday, prompting record label Universal Music to demand its removal and raising the question of intellectual property. First published on TikTok, the song “Heart on my sleeve” which has more than 15 million views on the social network, has been removed from the catalogs of Spotify or Apple Music at the request of Universal Music Group (UMG) , which represents both artists, citing copyright violations.
“This is just the beginning”
“I used an AI to create a Drake song with The Weeknd”, wrote the one who calls himself Ghostwriter977 in a video on which we see a figure covered with a white sheet sporting sunglasses. The original video has since been deleted from social media, but continues to be shared by many netizens across different platforms.
“This is just the beginning,” he wrote on his TikTok page as new videos featuring the track are reposted frequently. The title, which mixes hip hop and rap sounds, clones the voices of the artists by simulating exchanges about actress Selena Gomez, with whom The Weeknd recently had a short history.
This “begs the question of which side of the story all players in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans, and human creative expression, or the side of deep forgery, fraud and the denial to artists of the remuneration due to them,” Universal Music Group (UMG) told AFP. In March, the record company wrote to streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, asking them to block AI services from extracting melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.
David Guetta wants to “open the discussion for awareness”
The use of AI in music is a subject of debate in the music industry, with some denouncing the legal abuses it entails and others praising its prowess. David Guetta recently used AI for a rapper Eminem-style voice for one of his shows. The star DJ did not market this title, explaining to the BBC that he wanted to “open the discussion for awareness”.