For better or worse, the AI-generated Drake and The Weeknd track signals change to the rap game
Forget journalism; AI's newest scary ability appears to be mastering Drake's easy-breezy flow. The internet is into it, but not everyone is sold.
Music News Drake
Although software like ChatGPT’s ability to truly wield a pen has oftentimes been laughably questionable, AI software is nevertheless infiltrating the rap game—and getting frighteningly good at it. Artists like Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, Tupac Shakur, Juice WRLD, and more have recently seen AI-generated versions of their voices used on different covers.
Listening to fake Rihanna perform Drake’s “Find Your Love” and fake Nicki tackle Ice Spice’s “Bikini Bottom” seemed, at first, like nothing more than internet fun and games. But a new viral song that features Drake and The Weeknd “performing” a new song neither of them had a hand in takes the trend to a new level, one that has both mesmerized fans and concerned some industry figures.
The track, titled “Heart On My Sleeve,” features eerily realistic renditions of Drake and The Weeknd’s voices over a Metro Boomin beat. Made ostensibly without the use of any human vocals or production, to the untrained ear the song doesn’t necessarily sound out of place within Drake’s discography (with some even opining that it’s better than his other recent work.) So far, the song has accumulated over 11 million views across different promotional videos, per Rolling Stone.
A deep dive on the origins of “Heart On My Sleeve” conducted by Twitter user and author Mitchell Landon seemed to reveal that the track—originally posted by TikTok creator Ghostwriter977—actually came from Laylo, a creator-focused salesforce service that helps creators connect directly with their fans. Via Twitter, Laylo founder Alec Ellin has previously expressed interest in using AI-generated hip-hop voices for different projects, including podcasts.
While some online users—including producer Hit-Boy—have heralded AI’s emceeing abilities as an exciting new horizon for rap music, others are disheartened by the growing commonplaceness of these tracks, with some pointing out that the specific focus on AI-rendered hip-hop speaks to a cultural contempt for unapologetically Black, urban music and the lived realities and human creativity that informs it. Producer Pete Rock has been a vocal critic of the trend, which he called “mad disrespectful” in a Sunday night Twitter statement.
“They cant beat black culture so what do they do when they cant measure natural talent?” he wrote. “Silly shit like AI! AI is such a cowardly act that bears no real soul or feeling.”
When it comes to the rappers the technology cribs from—not to mention their record labels—the AI-generated tracks are a concerning new prospect. After a ChatGPT-generated track that featured Eminem’s voice rapping about cats gained some online traction, his record label Universal Music Group had it wiped from the internet, slapping YouTuber Grandayy with a copyright strike. Elsewhere, more than 40 major music and entertainment organizations—including the Recording Academy and SAG-AFTRA— have united as the Human Artistry Campaign, a coalition that focuses on ensuring AI never replaces human creators.
“There are fundamental elements of our culture that are uniquely human. Only humans are capable of communicating the endless intricacies, nuances, and complications of the human condition through art – whether it be music, performance, writing, or any other form of creativity,” the coalition’s homepage states. “Developments in artificial intelligence are exciting and could advance the world farther than we ever thought possible. But AI can never replace human expression and artistry.”
As for Drake—whose voice has been laid out over everything from Ice Spice’s “Munch” to Colby Callait’s “Bubbly”— it seems the rapper has had enough of the trend. In response to the “Munch” edit, Drake declared via Instagram: “This is the final straw AI.” Hey, better to address the trend head-on now; the way the technology is moving, in a few months a case of Instagram beef could lead to a Drake diss track penned by an AI version of himself.
34 Comments
My English class is obsessed with ChatGPT rn we just watched “I, Robot”…. man now that AI can successfully generate art we are fuuuucked. My teacher today was like “I read a poem over the weekend written by AI that brought me to tears, I always hoped to write a brilliant poem one day, now I don’t think I will”. This is why we are fucked.
Your teacher sounds depressed, like an AI made a poem they liked and so now it’s pointless for them to write? The point of making a poem is not to make it “brilliant” in my opinion, the act of writing and creative expression is what makes art. Someone should lie to your teacher and tell them it was a real human writing the poem so they don’t lose the will to live
Sounds like your teacher needs to get a grip.
How is it that cosmicghostrider is always invoking other people to make their points, and these other people always sound insufferable?
“John Keats wrote a beautiful poem hundreds of years ago, so why should I bother?”
We are fucked because people are idiots, your teacher seems like a right tool.
Funny, that’s how you sound to me after writing such an unempathetic and thoughtless comment.
If you’re a teacher and you’re genuinely touched by a regurgitated piece of media that had barely any thought put into it to the point where you give up on creation, you’re an idiot and a tool and it just betrays to me that you became a teacher out of necessity, not passion.Yes, I am unempathetic towards people who think that AI art is anything else but a tool, because the moment people convince themselves it’s anything more, we are fucked.
Yeah, I think this is pretty much how many artists feel. AI has destroyed their desire to be creative. And yes, we’ll keep on with our lives, but it will certainly be a trend where humanities creativity will decrease as AI takes over all this type of work.
Step 1. Generate thousands of poems with an AI
Step 2. Discard the 99.9% of them that are insipid garbage or just incoherentStep 3. Present the one good one as a miraculous work of genius and declare that AI will destroy us all
Not to say AI will “destroy us all,” but LLMs have made massive, and worrying leaps in less than a year. The current GPT is astoundingly good at making fake articles with the right inputs. Down to citations, ISBN and page numbers, which can be entirely made up if you’re telling it to mimic that style. I’ve edited Wikipedia on and off for ages, for instance, and it’s now being inundated with AI edits and articles that are surprising cogent. Often it doesn’t even invent sources, but actually summarizes a source quite well, because it’s scrubbed a million iterations summarizing that source from across the net. The current AI detection tools available are utter shit on top of that. They false positive on everything. This doesn’t include how good AI powered deepfakes are getting from an audio an visual standpoint. The audio part is pretty much there. The visual part is getting close. With people’s propensity to want believe what they’re seeing to confirm their beliefs, there is some uncharted territory coming.
People have proven themselves willing to believe lies presented via infographics and plain text, so increasing the quality of presentation isn’t necessarily going to increase engagement with misinformation. AI generated misinformation will probably add to the glut of data that many of us are currently ignoring. It’s interesting to wonder when a deepfake video will be mistake ln for real on the mass scale, but then again hoaxes aren’t a new thing. The more interesting question to me is whether politicians or cops will be able to argue that a real video is a deepfake in order to avoid consequences for their actions.
The more interesting question to me is whether politicians or cops will be able to argue that a real video is a deepfake in order to avoid consequences for their actions.Or just deepfake a video themselves and claim it’s real, which is arguably scarier.
Step 4. Cocktails and networking
That sounds like an excuse to me. Write a poem from a place of honesty, work on it as much as you feel appropriate, and then let the world decide whether or not it’s brilliant, which it will anyway.
sounds like shit
Running the risk of sounding like the out of touch curmudgeon that I very much am, I think the verisimilitude here says more about Drake’s shitty rapping than it does about the powers of AI.
Or the essentially monotonous nature of most rap.
If you’re talking about modern rap, then yeah. But the “golden age” had a wide range of cadences and styles that I’d wager would be a lot tougher for AI to ape accurately.
I enjoyed this article about AI generating stand up comedy: https://www.vulture.com/article/comedians-analyze-chatgpt-jokes.htmlMy favorite part is that most of the comics say that the algorithm’s points of reference are basic white-person stuff that doesn’t match their comedic voice, but Pete Holmes (of course) goes on about how accurate it is.
That’s always been AI’s blind spot. Tech in general. Facial recognition, voice recognition, it does really well with white people because that’s who’s running the companies and setting the parameters for devs to work under.
Is the AI Drake also creeping into the DMs of underage girls, or that just for the real Drake?
I predict that – should this technology proliferate into mainstream adoption, not just awareness – there will be outrage amongst a certain pocket of artists and fans for a period, until an artist uses the technology themselves a la T-Pain with autotune. It may be panned by “purists” and critics, but if an artist achieves popularity with it, then the industry won’t care what these luddites think (It’s me I’m luddites). It’ll be full steam ahead from there.Sure we’ll see various conversations about the “art” of pop music or whatever, and there may be legal intervention for using someone’s voice “likeness” in a track they didn’t cosign. But I don’t see this going away at all.Hell, imagine if T Swift had “re-recorded” her new versions of old albums but using this technology. If it reached enough parity with the originals, I wonder how her fans would take it. I would assume they would be just fine.
After a ChatGPT-generated track that featured Eminem’s voice rapping about cats gained some online traction, his record label Universal Music Group had it wiped from the internet, slapping YouTuber Grandayy with a copyright strike.That’s going to be interesting if it goes to court. Universal Music Group doesn’t actually hold the copyright to anything in the track.
The copyright strike is an easy way to get something off social media. If/when one of these cases actually goes to work, it will be a more boring and convoluted IP debate. But this isn’t even new territory – passing off a sound alike as a famous musician isn’t allowed.
This is amazing news for record labels. They’ve always enjoyed the popularity of rap because it all but eliminated musicians and made the front person an interchangeable part. Now the front person is even more interchangeable.
Think of all the dead artists that can make a comeback now.They can become contributing members of society again.
It’s not really all that surprising, is it? I mean, take auto-tune. That meant labels could just focus on finding artists with “the look”, as the singing could essentially take care of itself (there’s a longer discussion about what it took to normalise autotuned vocals not just as a gimmick but as a standard, but that’s too big a comment for right now).And with AI (fuck that, it’s not “AI”) machine-learning tools they won’t even need to hire ghost-writers/hit-makers to write the tracks either… or even have a real person actually perform them!It’s the ultimate in “music as an assembly-line product” – especially when you consider that labels are buying up the rights to entire back-catalogues, which can then be fed into the machine without, I assume, violating copyright, to create “new” material based on what has already been successful.
Forget journalismThe AV Club
Can’t forget something you never did.
But AI can never replace human expression and artistry. Uh, it’s not.
But AI art is going to co-exist with human artistry. There are leaders who still don’t understand the internet and its implications. They don’t have the first idea how to handle AI, let alone control it. Might as well get used to it.
I dunno. Feels like the quickest way to kill the AI revolution is to run it up against the RIAA’s lawyers.
This still feels like a novelty to me. Yeah, it kind of sounds like a lazy Drake/Weeknd collaboration, but that’s because the AI was trained with many hours of existing tracks between Drake and The Weeknd. If real humans hadn’t labored over all those tracks first, the AI would be totally lost. Both those artists have distinctive vocal approaches that make their music easily identifiable, which is how we can listen to the AI version and nod that it sounds similar. But AI can’t create its own original distinctive vocalist. It needs to sample something created by humans first. It’s more like a clone stamper than an artist.