12/05/2023

AI’s Influence on Music Is Raising Some Difficult Questions

AI is already being used by music producers

Earlier this year, Bad Bunny emphatically rejected rumors that he was about to release a new song with Justin Bieber. "That's fake," he told TIME in an interview for a cover story on his meteoric rise. "You never know what I'm going to do."

But last month, a song featuring what sounded like his and Bieber’s voices started circulating on TikTok, garnering millions of likes. Bad Bunny hadn't lied in the interview, though: the song was created with AI. An artist named FlowGPT had used AI technology to recreate the voices of Bad Bunny, Bieber and Daddy Yankee in a reggae-ton anthem. Bad Bunny himself hated it, calling it a "shit of a song" in Spanish and discouraging his fans from listening, and the clip was removed from TikTok. But many fans of all three artists loved it all the same.

The song and the polarized reactions to it are emblematic of the fraught ways in which AI has stormed the music industry. Over the past couple of years, advancements in machine learning have made it possible for anyone sitting in their homes to reproduce the sound of their musical idols. One artist, Ghostwriter, went viral for mimicking Drake and The Weeknd; another creator jokingly set Frank Sinatra's smoky voice to profane Lil Jon lyrics. Other AI tools have allowed users to conjure songs just by typing in prompts, which are effectively the audio versions of text-to-image tools like DALL-E.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.