Neither Although neither Drake nor The Weeknd actually appeared on “Heart on My Sleeve,” a fake AI song created by allowing AI to sample, the song has millions of listens. TikTok user Ghostwriter977 used AI to clone the voices of Drake and The Weeknd for a song “Heart on My Sleeve” that sounds so convincing that fans believed it was a new release and which was played 250,000 times on Spotify in just 3 days. The “arranger” Ghostwriter977 said that they were “a ghostwriter for years and got paid close to nothing just for major labels to profit.” On the track, the two simulated artists swap verses about pop star and actor Selena Gomez who The Weeknd dated for 10 months before the pair called it quits in 2017.
Just as record labels desperately tried to ignore music going online in the early days of the Internet to preserve their revenues,…and failed…music companies are now trying to persuade popular streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, etc to block AI-generated songs, claiming that they are using the labels’ copyrighted songs without licence to train their algorithms.
As recently stated by Nick Lockett at the Queen Mary London conference on Intellectual Property crime, it is highly unlikely that there is any infringement in the USA by training algorithms on existing music and that it is expected that the recent Californian Class Action will fail, and there is no doubt at all that in the UK, there cannot be an offence as there is an exemption under s9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, even though the law is 30 years old.
This time though, it’s not just the music labels panicking, the Artists are too because anyone can now compose a song and use AI to sound like their favourite artist. We are about to enter a generation of AI-created music which in copyright in songs will lie with the writers and composers but the performance will be by AI-artists which does not qualify for copyright. Those artists will not fall ill, they will never give up, they will never fall out with fellow artists in the same band and will absolutely never lose their vocal range as they get older. We will see AI artists who are performing songs whilst sounding awfully like a particular artist or a cross between two artists.
Some artists who are already past their prime in terms of vocal range and performance will no-doubt absorb the future and continue to produce songs using the AI and, either choose to keep quiet about the use of AI when it is likely that no-one will be any wiser, or be honest and simply say “AI allows me to return with new songs as if they were sung at my prime….. and lots of fans will be delighted.