AI songs, from Drake and The Weeknd’s Heart on My Sleeve to Paul McCartney and Oasis copy Aisis, take pop music in an inhuman direction
- Heart on My Sleeve, a recent collaboration between singers Drake and The Weeknd, went viral on the internet, but neither artist had anything to do with the song
- The track was entirely AI-generated and is the latest in a string of non-human songs mimicking artists from Paul McCartney to Oasis. What are the implications?
It didn’t take long for AI to hit its hyperspeed moment, which was ushered in when a new song by The Weeknd and Drake took the internet by storm.
Now artists, listeners and the recording industry have been thrown into an existential crisis that up until a few months ago seemed like the plot of a potential Black Mirror episode. And things are about to get really crazy, if they haven’t already.
In just the past few months, AI has gone from a thing you may have used to tweak your Instagram avatar to something that is ready to take over the world.
And after a story on AI that aired recently on 60 Minutes’, Scott Pelley signed off with the following: “We’ll end with a note that has never appeared on 60 Minutes, but one in the AI revolution you may be hearing often: the preceding was created with 100 per cent human content.”
Yes, human content. That’s humans – with all their faults, misgivings, personality flaws, grudges, biases and, you know, humanity – over here, and AI, spit-shined to perfection, over here.
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The choice seems simple. Which side are you on?
Humans, of course. But have you listened to “Heart on Your Sleeve”, and were you also struck by the fact that it may be – Drake’s complete non-participation in the song aside – Drake’s best song in two years?
Drake, along with Frank Ocean and Chance the Rapper, has signed an exclusive deal for new music with Apple.
Not so easy now, is it? But it begs the question – and we’ll limit the wide-reaching AI debate here strictly to pop-music terms – what do we want from artists?
Is it their artistry, their expression, the baring of their soul, which includes making do with their flaws and imperfections, and the fact that sometimes, because they’re human, they botch Coachella headline performances?
Or do we want to control them, which is what AI allows us to do, in essence: cherry-pick their best qualities, use them how we want to use them, and create what we want them to create.
It’s the ultimate idea of fan service, of wish fulfilment, rendered whole. And it’s not just happening to Drake and The Weeknd.
Scroll through TikTok and you’ll hear dozens of examples of fan-generated AI songs, pairing your favourite artists’ likenesses over your other favourite artists’ songs.
Ariana Grande singing pretty much anything you can think of? Just type it in the search bar, it’s out there.
That’s not all. Earlier this year, superstar DJ David Guetta called on AI to create an Eminem-sounding track, which he went on to sample in his live show.
“There’s something that I made as a joke,” he explained in a YouTube clip about the Deepfake Eminem sample, “and it worked so good!”
And an entire album of songs in the style of Oasis, dubbed Aisis (see what they did there?), was released this week, with an AI-modelled Liam Gallagher’s vocals, a reimagining of what the band might have sounded like had its classic line-up stayed together and kept banging out tracks.
Listening to it, that’s precisely what it sounds like, and if you didn’t know any better, you might think the boys buried the hatchet and got the band back together. (Even Liam Gallagher himself weighed in on the experiment, giving his approval and opining of his not-quite vocals, “I sound mega”.)
Now if Oasis really do get back together, maybe Liam won’t sound mega, and maybe the songs will be sluggish, the songwriting uninspired. Maybe it will be a letdown. But it will be real, it will be human, it will actually be them. So, what’s better?
There’s also the question of legality, and likeness, and appropriation of likeness, and a whole bunch of other technical stuff that is absolutely not going to stop someone from making Mariah Carey-soundalike Black Sabbath covers, or whatever else strikes their mood. (That doesn’t exist yet, and probably shouldn’t.)
The cat is out of the bag, and as the record companies learned the hard way from the great Napster debacle, it’s not going back in.
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That didn’t stop Universal Music Group from pulling “Heart on My Sleeve” down from YouTube and streaming sites, where it had already garnered millions of listens. Making it go away isn’t going to make it go away, or stop the next one from popping up, or the next one after that.
But what if the artists themselves got on board with “Heart on My Sleeve”? What if they re-recorded the song, using their own voices? Could the AI – and the human user behind it, in this case the anonymous Ghostwriter977 – inspire the real artists?
It’s not going to be as simple as demonising AI. Maybe this year’s song of the summer will be an AI creation. Would that automatically be bad?
While there are many questions yet to be asked and answered, of this much we’re confident: the preceding was created with 100 per cent human content.
