Perhaps unable to land a proper collaboration with Eminem on his own, David Guetta has taken matters into his own hands with the help of AI. At a recent gig, the superstar DJ/producer showed off exactly what the technology can do by playing a snippet of a new song with deepfake vocals sounding eerily like the Detroit rapper.
“Let me introduce you to… Emin-AI-em,” Guetta wrote in a tweet sharing a clip from the concert. The intro of the unreleased track features a voice that sounds remarkably similar to Eminem’s. “This is the future rave sound,” it says. “I’m getting awesome and underground.” The resemblance to Em’s actual voice is uncanny.
Guetta broke down how he was able to deepfake Eminem in the remainder of the video. “Eminem, bro! This is something I made as a joke and it worked so good, I could not believe it,” he said. “I discovered those websites about AI — basically, you can write lyrics in the style of any artist you like. So I typed ‘write a verse in the style of Eminem about future rave.’ And I went to another AI website that can recreate the voice. I put the text in that and I played the record and people went nuts.”
As a disclaimer, Guetta emphasized he’s “not releasing it commercially obviously,” but that doesn’t absolve him from the ethical implication of deepfaking another artist’s voice. Anyone in the audience that night could’ve easily been fooled into thinking Guetta actually made a song with Eminem, and it’s pretty clear Em had no idea this was happening.
Guetta isn’t exactly known for thinking things through. In June 2020, he remixed Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech as a house track in honor of George Floyd.
Thanks to the proliferation of ChatGPT, AI has become more accessible than ever. However, neither Jerry Seinfeld nor Nick Cave have been impressed by AI-generated attempts to mimic their work.
Last year, Capitol Records crashed and burned with their FN Meka project, a virtual rapper who dropped the N-word in lyrics generated by AI.