Culture

We Don’t Own Our Voices

The viral song by Ghostwriter977, ‘Heart on my Sleeve’ (HomS), raises interesting questions about copyright law and an artist’s voice.

The song, which features an AI-generated replica of Drake’s voice rapping lyrics written by Ghostwriter977, went viral over the past couple of weeks. Firstly, due to the quality of the song, which in the public’s opinion supersedes most of Drake’s recent releases. But secondly, and most importantly, because of how reactive record labels became by quickly removing all copies of the song from streaming services and YouTube, bringing a lot of attention to how new AI tech will interact with the music industry.

Technically speaking, the song could not be taken down for copyright infringements on its own, except for two small details.

First, at the beginning of the track, there is a producer tagline by Metro Boomin (one of the main beat producers at the moment). Because this tagline was directly copied from Metro Boomin’s other tracks this opened HomS up to copyright infringement arguments and takedown requests.

Secondly, record labels argued that HomS was created on the framework of copyright infringement, therefore it logically breached copyright and was open to takedowns. This is because the models used for replicating artists’ voices (of which there are many) have to learn that from somewhere. And in order to sound like a real artist that somewhere is the artist’s discography.

Record labels have had to rely on indirect arguments to sustain their takedown request of HomS, which points to an interesting gap that has gone substantially unexplored until now. AI-produced tracks replicating real-living artists will push the limits of this to interesting distances. It will be interesting to see what agreement is reached between platforms and industry players, but most of all how will they seek to curb this open-source tooling, because once it’s in the hands of the public there’s no taking it back.

A good overview of this issue was done by The Vergecast.

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