In the last week, highly anticipated songs by Drake and Taylor Swift appeared to leak online, sparking enormous reactions. Massive Reddit threads spawned, dissecting musical choices. Meme videos were created simulating other rappers’ reactions to being dissed by Drake. The rapper Rick Ross even responded to the song’s bars about him with a diss track of his own.
But there was one big problem: neither Swift nor Drake confirmed that the songs were real. In fact, loud contingents on social media claimed that the songs were AI-generated hoaxes, and begged fellow fans not to listen to them. Fervent fans soon became engulfed in rabid hunts for clues and debates aimed at decoding the songs’ levels of authenticity.
These types of arguments have recently intensified and will only continue ballooning, as AI vocal clones keep improving and becoming increasingly accessible to everyday people. These days, even an artist’s biggest fans have trouble telling the difference between their heroes and AI-creations. They will continue to be stymied in the coming months, as the music industry and lawmakers slowly work to determine how best to protect human creators from artificial imposters.
The Advent of AI Deepfakes
AI first shook the pop music world last year, when a song that seemed to be by Drake and the Weekend called “Heart on My Sleeve” went viral, with millions of plays across TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube. But the song was soon revealed to have been created by an anonymous musician named ghostwriter977, who used an AI-powered filter to turn their voice into those of both pop stars.
Many fans of both artists loved the song anyway, and it was later submitted for Grammys consideration. And some artists embraced new deepfake technology, including Grimes, who has long experimented with technological advancements and who developed a clone of her voice and then encouraged musicians to create songs using it.
But soundalikes soon began roiling the fanbases of other…
