AI-Generated Song Featuring Drake and The Weeknd Goes Viral

Summary:

• A song featuring the AI-generated voices of Drake and The Weeknd has gone viral on social media.
• Heart On My Sleeve has already crossed 8.5 million views on TikTok.
• Global music giant Universal Music Group recently asked Apple Music, Spotify, and other music streaming platforms to prevent AI models from being trained on copyrighted music.

Heart On My Sleeve, a song generated entirely by artificial intelligence (AI) and featuring the soundalike voices of Drake and The Weeknd, has recently gone viral on social media — reports the BBC.

The song has already crossed 8.5 million views on TikTok after being posted on Friday, and the full version has been played over 216,000 times on YouTube and 254,000 times on Spotify.

Heart on My Sleeve‘s creator, @ghostwriter said the track was created by a model that was trained on Drake and The Weeknd’s voices. “This is just the beginning,” they wrote under the song’s YouTube video.

The song is far from perfect — it sounds a bit scratchy and low-fidelity, which is a limitation of current music generators. What’s more, the AI-generated vocals also sound slurred or glitchy at some points. Check it out for yourself below:

Even though Heart on My Sleeve sounds quite unlike a human production,  it is overall quite convincing — hence its popularity.

The AI reproduction of Drake and The Weeknd’s talents comes amid growing concerns about the nascent technology exploiting the works of human artists. Google created an AI model, dubbed MusicLM, that can generate music from any text description but never released it because of the “risk of potential misappropriation” of copyrighted content.

Global music giant Universal Music Group recently asked Apple Music, Spotify, and other music streaming platforms to prevent AI models from being trained on copyrighted music.

UMG is also on a crusade to purge music streaming services of “lower-quality” songs like ambient music and AI-generated tracks. Similar AI-generated “deepfake” songs have recently gone viral, including Rihanna singing Beyoncé’s Cuff It, and Kanye West singing Hey There, Delilah.