Photo Credit: Dave’s Hot Chicken
With AI music generation technology in the hands of the masses, song covers are popping up all over social media. Drake has finally broken his silence on the trend after a viral track of him rapping Ice Spice’s “Munch” popped up.
The Canadian rapper finally addressed the trend of creating a verse in a rapper’s style in a story on Instagram. In the post, Drake shared a story about Universal Music asking its DSPs to block AI companies from accessing its songs. “This is the final straw AI,” Drake writes in the caption of the post.
AI got Drake rapping “Munch” 😂 pic.twitter.com/pWYB5rcjgg
— Complex Music (@ComplexMusic) April 14, 2023
“We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent the unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators,” A UMG spokesperson said about its request. “We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists.”
Clips of AI-generated music that have surfaced include Travis Scott rapping Pop Smoke’s “For the Night,” Rihanna singing Beyonce’s “Cuff It,” and Kanye West singing Justin Bieber’s hit, “Love Yourself.” These AI voice models are able to take just a quick sample of a person’s voice and deliver a verse that sounds like the artist.
David Guetta demonstrated this when he asked ChatGPT to write an Eminem-style lyric about EDM. He then ran that lyric through an audio-generator asking it to ‘rap in the style of Eminem.’ The track cannot be distributed commercially, but Guetta did play the song during a set. So what was the AI generated Eminem lyric? “This is the future rave sound/ I’m getting awesome and underground.”
Generative AI has left many artists questioning what their future roles will be in the realm of creating art. Artists, musicians, programmers, and many more creative jobs could be impacted by these AI tools—which is why China is regulating them closely.