In the past few months, AI has become the new NFTs of the music industry. You know, the vaguely futuristic new tech toy that artists and labels can milk for a bit before the bottom inevitably falls out because no one is regulating these things and regular people get bored with them.
Google’s got a music AI, a new AI song generator lets you cobble together a fake Drake song, and labels are trying to sign racist caricatures of Black people in the form of “virtual rappers” whose songs are being written by algorithms.
We’ve reached a new frontier in predictive text (all of these things are essentially that Twitter prompt about pressing the middle suggestion until a sentence comes out, just slightly more advanced) and it seems no one can resist — least of all, artists whose music already consists of a lot of electronically-produced sounds in the first place.
French DJ David Guetta recently premiered a new song of his that “features” Eminem during a concert, sharing the video online. Eminem “appears” courtesy of AI, thanks to an AI song generator Guetta found online, he explains in the clip. He said he has no plans in place to release the song commercially, but hey, again: Not everybody is going to want to be in on this joke. See: Rick Astley suing Yung Gravy for employing a soundalike on his breakaway hit.
If I sound down on all this supposed “artificial intelligence” — well, it’s because I am. It’s all fun and games until “stars” are endorsing products and philosophies they never would in real life and scammers are using AI-generated co-signs to help bilk folks out of their hard-earned money (in this economy???), to say nothing of how quickly these bots learn to be racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. Until someone gets a handle on legislating these gizmos, all the pieces are available for some truly disastrous outcomes. Anyway, check out David Guetta doing a song with a fake Eminem below.
Let me introduce you to… Emin-AI-em pic.twitter.com/48prbMIBtv
— David Guetta (@davidguetta) February 3, 2023