Grimes Is Actually Encouraging Use Of Her Voice In AI Songs In Response To The Viral Drake And The Weeknd AI Track

In recent days, a lot of attention has been paid to AI-generated music, specifically a song that used copies of Drake and The Weeknd’s voices. The track got removed from streaming platforms, but not before Meek Mill listened to it a bunch of times. Grimes, ever one to embrace new technologies, has some thoughts about this and about the use of AI clones of her own voice.

Yesterday (April 23), Grimes took to Twitter to share a screenshot of an article about the Drake/Weeknd AI song. She wrote, “I’ll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings.” She added in another tweet, “I think it’s cool to be fused w a machine and I like the idea of open sourcing all art and killing copyright.”

That led to some good follow-up questions. One Twitter user asked, “would the title of such a song credit you as a featured artist, or how would you prefer it?” Grimes replied, “Sure – anything anyone wants. Im just curious what even happens and interested in being a Guinea pig.” Somebody else wondered, “Hey can you pls tell everyone that they need to upload to elf.tech [Grimes’ website] in order to get approval from Media Empire?” She responded, “I feel like we shouldn’t force approvals – but rather work out publishing with stuff that’s super popular. That seems most efficient? We cud use elf tech for it tho – but I think we’ll notice if a grimes song goes viral.”

Grimes also noted that she’s working on AI-ifying her voice herself, tweeting, “We’re making a program that should simulate my voice well but we could also upload stems and samples for ppl to train their own.” Somebody asked about how that endeavor is going and Grimes replied, “we were p far along last I checked. I sorta just spur of the moment decided to do this lol but we were making a sim of my voice for our own plans and they were almost done.”

Finneas seems to be on board with Grimes’ vision: He shared her original post and added, “So lit.”

Meek Mill is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.