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I believe a big reason this song blew up on social media was that it was misleadingly hyped as an "AI-generated song". I expect many people thought that AI comp

I believe a big reason this song blew up on social media was that it was misleadingly hyped as an "AI-generated song". I expect many people thought that AI composed and recorded the (reasonably idiomatic) music and lyrics. For the record, here's my understanding of how this "AI-generated song" was made: 1. A human wrote the lyrics 2. A human recorded the beat 3. A human recorded themselves rapping 4. An "AI voice filter" made the recorded voice sound like Drake / the Weeknd. IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) but that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard.

djxfade 3y ago
That's just how the music industry has become. As an indie musician myself, it's incredible hard to get heard. So while I don't agree with what was done in this case, I can understand why.
- tokai 3y ago
  Is it though? This never been easier just to upload something and get some amount of listeners. If you lived a bit rural and was a poor teenager in the 60s you could forget ever getting anyone to listen to your music, if you even had the instruments to play it. Nobody is owed a big audience.
  - koolba 3y ago
    In the 60s you could find a few local DJs, slide them a couple bucks or some reefer, and you’d get a non-trivial amount of ears. With the sheer volume of online music and lack of people to bribe or sleep with, it’s very difficult for a new entrant to get known.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      Spotify offers that as well actually, you pay, they put your songs on playlists that match your song's vibe.
    - tokai 3y ago
      And now you can create, distribute, and market you song for free to a world wide audience. The weirdest stuff can get a thousand plays on soundcloud. Much more than you'll get from being played at any random bar or club. Also you would have to make a vinyl print of you song to provide it to a dj.
      - rchaud 3y ago
        Signal over noise. You notice more cars driving through a quiet residential street than you do driving 60 on the highway.
      - ipaddr 3y ago
        Thousands of soundcloud plays means one person one listen and this is over years. Many of those are short listens / skips. In a bar you could have a few hundred people all listening at once passively the entire song while associating with good times drinking. Sharing a song with a group will create memories and stronger associations
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      And the sheer volume of high quality legal reefer has also made it much harder to bribe DJs.
    - nemo44x 3y ago
      Recording your music to any level of quality they would play on the radio back then was expensive. It was really time consuming to lay down tracks and edit them. Like manually cutting tape, etc. Today anyone can make a professional sounding recording at home.
    - jakear 3y ago
      Still possible with many small local radio stations. Mail in a CD with your shit and a genre label and odds are someone will listen to a track or two to decide if it has a place on their show.
    - eldritch_4ier 3y ago
      This is what a pure meritocracy looks like. There's no more tricks, there's no more hacks, it's just a tight few metrics that you're either really really good at, or you aren't. It's the same with the rest of the country. Turns out a pure meritocracy leaves a lot of losers because there can only be so many winners.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    It's never been easier to publish a blog available to billions of people that no one ever reads. In the 60s you would travel to a music centre. A place where others performing music went. You leveraged a community. If someone in your community made it, it shone a light for everyone and created a scene. People helped each other make it. That small community with those opportunities have been replaced by centralization without the community or scene multipliers.
- cmilton 3y ago
  Do you want equal opportunity or equal outcome?
jjulius 3y ago
>IMO, the real tragedy here is ... that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard. Genuinely curious to hear why this is a tragedy. Does everyone who puts out anything original deserve to have it heard by a wider audience? Edit: Asking as someone who has always been heavily involved in various aspects of music and has watched a massive increase in the volume of music being put out now that it's significantly easier to produce on your own. This is a very complicated topic.
- waboremo 3y ago
  To me it's pretty easy to grasp that it's disappointing the artist had to mask as two of the most successful artists of all time to get heard, while also understanding that it's the easier route to do that. It's easier to be a ghost writer than it is to push your own brand, that sort of situation.
  - darkerside 3y ago
    "Had to" seems the wrong phrase. First world problem if I ever heard one.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      I don't believe there's any point in debating semantics or dismissing the topic of discussion based on it being a "first world problem".
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        I think it's a fair point to raise, 'had to' implies some form of compulsion or fixed process or unmovable obstacle in any context I've heard of.
    - afavour 3y ago
      I don't really understand the objection here. Must we couch everything with "of course in the grand scheme of the world and poverty and famine it isn't a big deal, but..."
uhtred 3y ago
If he did everything he could to make it sound like Drake or The Weeknd musically and lyrically then it wasn't original and didn't deserve to get noticed much. One less clone if a world of clones isn't a tragedy.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bjt2n3904 3y ago
> IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) Man, what a skewed version of justice this is. "He'll be fine." The REAL victim is this unnoticed artist? Give me a break. What he did impersonating another artist was wrong. There's this perverse notion that has infused our society where it's ok to rob from a Target or Walmart because it doesn't really "hurt" them. "They have insurance. They'll be fine!" That standard of justice will lead society to a very VERY bad place if you follow it.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Allowing massive conglomerates to exist has already led society to a VERY bad place already. Anyways, besides that, impersonation for personal gain or to cause disadvantage is already criminal. If Drake wants to do something about that, he can.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- siftrics 3y ago
  I agree that it's not okay to rob the wealthy simply because they are wealthy. But this case is more nuanced. A compelling argument can be made against the very idea of robbery of IP. I think the vast majority of "intellectual property" should not, in fact, be anyone's property, and therefore no one can be robbed of it. Who is harmed and who benefits in the situation where Drake has a lock and key on his IP? Consumers are harmed --- they clearly enjoy new Drake music regardless of whether or not it was written and sung by Drake, but this is not allowed. The "AI artist" is harmed --- they could have created something valuable in the world, but this is not allowed. Drake artificially benefits from a regulatory monopoly. Everyone is strictly worse off because of arbitrary, draconian rules. A much better example is drug patents. Literally millions of lives could be saved --- and at a lower cost --- if patents didn't exist. Patents and intellectual property are just state-sanctioned monopolies where everyone is harmed and coerced to pay rent to some random asshole.
  - bjt2n3904 3y ago
    Drake's voice isn't intellectual property, it's his own identity. Drake has a right to decide what his voice says, and have a monopoly on it. The AI artist is not "harmed" because they can't use Drake's voice. I can't believe this needs to be said.
paulcole 3y ago
> IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) but that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard. The lyrics are semi-auto-biographical about The Weeknd and Drake. The guy who wrote this didn't date Selena Gomez. It's pretty uninteresting as a song if it's not from The Weeknd and Drake.
alexb_ 3y ago
Not quite - the voices afiak are pure AI with the tuning, pitch, etc done in post. Essentially treating the vocal signature of someone as if it was an instrument. And pretty much everyone knew the beat and lyrics weren't AI generated, at least from what I've seen. This is going viral after there was a viral trend of people replacing songs with Kanye West AI, so people knew what was happening. The impressive part is that the voices could be very convincing. That's what made it shareable.
- forrestbrazeal 3y ago
  | the voices afiak are pure AI with the tuning, pitch, etc done in post. That's what I thought at first too, but the available info suggests that the AI "autotune" was done on a human reference vocal. (cf https://twitter.com/rpnickson/status/1647603043851026433 https://twitter.com/rpnickson/status/1647603043851026433)
samstave 3y ago
just wait until the music industry elites start to recognize this... This was predicted (as so many other things have) in anime... Recall JEM? the soft-core-USA-version of anime? but so many things have been predicted/projected through anime (art)... the cyberpunk future of holographic AI media pieces has been a long trope in anime... at some point, youth will not care if its AI (EDM? YO!) and will just accept deepfake AI generated content along with AI generated sexually apealing rockstars... What was not predicted in anime, but will become a reality is the personalization of the 'messenger' where we listen to the same song, but mine is personalized to me, and you, yours. so if, say, female, the song may be talored to being delivered to you differently than to male... however, that doesnt mean the delivery is based on gender... there will be subtle differences in timbre tone and rythm based on you....
- Tronno 3y ago
  > the personalization of the 'messenger' where we listen to the same song, but mine is personalized to me, and you Dynamically generated, personalized content already exists in the form of video games. Yet it is not notable when an NPC remarks on my unique gear, achievements, etc. Technology may eventually enable easier remixing of art to personal tastes. However, this has also existed as long as art itself. What people look for in the artist is their uniquely curated tastes, human connection to the person themselves, and a sense of community with fellow fans. A machine that creates everything for everyone can provide none of these. Its output will be products, not art. It will have customers, not fans.
  - nonbirithm 3y ago
    > What people look for in the artist is their uniquely curated tastes, human connection to the person themselves, and a sense of community with fellow fans. Some people do, some people don't. There's nothing obligating an anime/SNS art hoarder to think this way, and if all they ever do is consume the end product without giving a thought to how the artist laid down the individual strokes that made the picture or how the artist's circle of friends and life story influenced their style, there's no consequences. The artist and other people with a similar mindset are unable to criticize these consumers because their behavior is invisible. When AI artists started appearing with art featuring blatantly copied styles, they did finally become open to such criticism. I have a feeling the nature of endless feeds with a practically infinite amount of art to consume has conditioned a lot of consumers to never have think about the human artist. They can just look at the stash in their Pictures folder and think "that's a cute X" divorced from the artistic context that's been integral in earlier art history. The consequences of this are only starting to become apparent right now. But I think if there were nothing like Stable Diffusion then one would be unable to tell apart the people who would be open to copying artists' styles with a hypothetical AI program to-be-invented in the future from people who wouldn't. They'd all just appear to be the same breed of fans. It was the invention of the technology and its spread that revealed those preferences.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Do you have any reason to believe people thought that? Everyone I talked to thought it was a human generated song with an autotune like drake ai filter on the lyrics.
- forrestbrazeal 3y ago
  Yes, many people assumed this. Here's the first example I found (scroll through the thread for many more): https://twitter.com/Russ_Wilcox/status/1647602468623114240 https://twitter.com/Russ_Wilcox/status/1647602468623114240 (Note that this guy was smart enough to ask the question - imagine how many people saw "AI-generated song" and just uncritically assumed a computer spat out the whole thing, chatGPT-style)
- giarc 3y ago
  I thought it was all AI generated.....
- JohnFen 3y ago
  This is what I thought -- but I also haven't heard the song.
poisonarena 3y ago
Do you have anything to back this up? a few days EARLIER this was released in Israel by KAN (television chanel).. I know you probably can't speak hebrew but here is a song made (vocals/lyrics/music) by AI, of two dead singers who are very famous in Israel (Zohar Argov and Ofra Haza).. It is convincing https://youtu.be/7ND1Pw6QD_0 https://youtu.be/7ND1Pw6QD_0 I think if it wasn't in hebrew language(and to be honest, Israeli) it would have been on HackerNews or at least on reddit somewhere. There is also some really good ones of Curt Cobain. The AI group is a Tel Aviv startup calle Aiode.
tivert 3y ago
> I believe a big reason this song blew up on social media was that it was misleadingly hyped as an "AI-generated song". I expect many people thought that AI composed and recorded the (reasonably idiomatic) music and lyrics. IIRC, I read that in the 70s many people thought Popcorn by Hot Butter was also written by a computer, but it was just played on (analog) synthesizers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_(instrumental) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_(instrumental) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK3ZP6frAMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK3ZP6frAMc
spaceman_2020 3y ago
I produce music but can’t sing to save my life. If I had access to an on-demand pitch perfect AI singer, I would likely release way more of my music to the public.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  https://www.vocaloid.com/en/ https://www.vocaloid.com/en/ I just ask you don't forget about the little people when you become famous
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > pitch perfect AI singer Just don't actually have it sing in a pitch-perfect manner. That's uninteresting.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  The thing with musicians are that there are so many talented musicians out there who can straight up show up and sight read a complex piece they never played before and put it on a record. Many who will work for free or close to it as a result of this saturation of talent. You could probably go on instagram and book a singer for your work by the afternoon.
  - pie420 3y ago
    that's the thing. something that would take 4+ hours and $100 or more can now be done for free in under an hour.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      That depends on if its faster to come up with the prompts to sing the song you are imagining in your head as a producer versus just hiring a cheap singer. Sometimes yes sometimes no I’d expect is the answer to this question, and given uncertainty some people do pay extra for certainty. Musicians pay extra for marginal quality gains too. If it was all just a race to the bottom all fender and gibsons would be made in China because no one cares, but thats not the case. American models that are sonically almost the same sometimes as a cheaper made in japan or thailand model command premiums due to the perceived quality.
msla 3y ago
It's been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter The story is that there was a program, Racter, which allegedly created a book titled "The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed" back in the 1980s. The book was released and was a hit primarily because of that AI connection, and a version of Racter was also sold. However, the Racter that got released could never have composed the book, leading me to this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34575252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34575252 > The least hypothesis is that the "good" version of Racter that supposedly composed the novel never existed, and that it was all a hoax made up by someone who wanted to bask in some publicity and sell the Racter that actually got released. As you say, the output is suspiciously good for something they insisted was accomplished on a home computer of the era and, oh no, they can't release the software that did it for Reasons... yeah, pull the other one, it's got bells on.
winternett 3y ago
The tune should have never been uploaded to begin with... I remix artists, but use their actual vocals, and never release remixes that aren't properly cleared... Putting out unauthorized work by others (for profit), especially when it emulates that they actually created the product, can harm their reputation. Putting out unauthorized work from musicians (for profit) often represents that the work was cleared... It's a move to either generate attention for the tool that they used, or for the emulation services they provide as "musicians", or even worse it could be a scam to make money off of putting out counterfeit music... I guess whoever was behind it (and now there will likely be even more of this) figures the legal issues that arise are worth the risk in seeking whatever profit may come from breaking common rules of music production such as this. It's troubling to see this happen as an Indie musician amid the already overly complex scam environment within the music industry.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  The legality of doing this depends on either the AI related lawsuits that have already been filed or legislative bodies answering the legal questions through new laws. Copying a voice isn't banned, per se. You can do a perfect impersonation of someone without fear of violating any copyright. Distributing recorded samples, however, is a clear copyright violation. So, does AI merely make an impersonation or is it combining files that you have no right to distribute to form the voice? Are images in the Stable Diffusion dataset partially embedded in the outputs or not? Are the stories ChatGPT writes just weapons grade copyright infringement? It all depends on how many rights we all attribute to the things we stuff into AI datasets. If AI models are ruled to be some kind of special case where the output doesn't violate the copyright if the training dataset, I think AI voice cloning should be completely legal. I believe the music and movie industries will do what they can to get the law on their side, perhaps demanding royalties for every work of theirs in AI datasets. Maybe they'll demand payment per generated work. I believe Universal is already demanding their partners to stop blocking scrapers for use in AI. I have no idea how a judge will rule on this. Based on the little work from professionals I've seen, it could go either way with current copyright laws.
deleted 3y ago
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lancesells 3y ago
> IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) but that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard. I haven't listened to the song in it's entirety or very closely but an actual Drake or Weeknd song usually has much better production and songwriting. Not saying it's not good or that Drake songs are good but from my amateur ear there's a difference in quality.

djxfade 3y ago

That's just how the music industry has become. As an indie musician myself, it's incredible hard to get heard. So while I don't agree with what was done in this case, I can understand why.

tokai 3y ago
Is it though? This never been easier just to upload something and get some amount of listeners. If you lived a bit rural and was a poor teenager in the 60s you could forget ever getting anyone to listen to your music, if you even had the instruments to play it. Nobody is owed a big audience.
- koolba 3y ago
  In the 60s you could find a few local DJs, slide them a couple bucks or some reefer, and you’d get a non-trivial amount of ears. With the sheer volume of online music and lack of people to bribe or sleep with, it’s very difficult for a new entrant to get known.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Spotify offers that as well actually, you pay, they put your songs on playlists that match your song's vibe.
  - tokai 3y ago
    And now you can create, distribute, and market you song for free to a world wide audience. The weirdest stuff can get a thousand plays on soundcloud. Much more than you'll get from being played at any random bar or club. Also you would have to make a vinyl print of you song to provide it to a dj.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      Signal over noise. You notice more cars driving through a quiet residential street than you do driving 60 on the highway.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      Thousands of soundcloud plays means one person one listen and this is over years. Many of those are short listens / skips. In a bar you could have a few hundred people all listening at once passively the entire song while associating with good times drinking. Sharing a song with a group will create memories and stronger associations
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    And the sheer volume of high quality legal reefer has also made it much harder to bribe DJs.
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    Recording your music to any level of quality they would play on the radio back then was expensive. It was really time consuming to lay down tracks and edit them. Like manually cutting tape, etc. Today anyone can make a professional sounding recording at home.
  - jakear 3y ago
    Still possible with many small local radio stations. Mail in a CD with your shit and a genre label and odds are someone will listen to a track or two to decide if it has a place on their show.
  - eldritch_4ier 3y ago
    This is what a pure meritocracy looks like. There's no more tricks, there's no more hacks, it's just a tight few metrics that you're either really really good at, or you aren't. It's the same with the rest of the country. Turns out a pure meritocracy leaves a lot of losers because there can only be so many winners.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  It's never been easier to publish a blog available to billions of people that no one ever reads. In the 60s you would travel to a music centre. A place where others performing music went. You leveraged a community. If someone in your community made it, it shone a light for everyone and created a scene. People helped each other make it. That small community with those opportunities have been replaced by centralization without the community or scene multipliers.
cmilton 3y ago
Do you want equal opportunity or equal outcome?

jjulius 3y ago

>IMO, the real tragedy here is ... that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard. Genuinely curious to hear why this is a tragedy. Does everyone who puts out anything original deserve to have it heard by a wider audience? Edit: Asking as someone who has always been heavily involved in various aspects of music and has watched a massive increase in the volume of music being put out now that it's significantly easier to produce on your own. This is a very complicated topic.

waboremo 3y ago
To me it's pretty easy to grasp that it's disappointing the artist had to mask as two of the most successful artists of all time to get heard, while also understanding that it's the easier route to do that. It's easier to be a ghost writer than it is to push your own brand, that sort of situation.
- darkerside 3y ago
  "Had to" seems the wrong phrase. First world problem if I ever heard one.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    I don't believe there's any point in debating semantics or dismissing the topic of discussion based on it being a "first world problem".
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      I think it's a fair point to raise, 'had to' implies some form of compulsion or fixed process or unmovable obstacle in any context I've heard of.
  - afavour 3y ago
    I don't really understand the objection here. Must we couch everything with "of course in the grand scheme of the world and poverty and famine it isn't a big deal, but..."

uhtred 3y ago

If he did everything he could to make it sound like Drake or The Weeknd musically and lyrically then it wasn't original and didn't deserve to get noticed much. One less clone if a world of clones isn't a tragedy.

deleted 3y ago

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bjt2n3904 3y ago

> IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) Man, what a skewed version of justice this is. "He'll be fine." The REAL victim is this unnoticed artist? Give me a break. What he did impersonating another artist was wrong. There's this perverse notion that has infused our society where it's ok to rob from a Target or Walmart because it doesn't really "hurt" them. "They have insurance. They'll be fine!" That standard of justice will lead society to a very VERY bad place if you follow it.

waboremo 3y ago
Allowing massive conglomerates to exist has already led society to a VERY bad place already. Anyways, besides that, impersonation for personal gain or to cause disadvantage is already criminal. If Drake wants to do something about that, he can.
deleted 3y ago
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siftrics 3y ago
I agree that it's not okay to rob the wealthy simply because they are wealthy. But this case is more nuanced. A compelling argument can be made against the very idea of robbery of IP. I think the vast majority of "intellectual property" should not, in fact, be anyone's property, and therefore no one can be robbed of it. Who is harmed and who benefits in the situation where Drake has a lock and key on his IP? Consumers are harmed --- they clearly enjoy new Drake music regardless of whether or not it was written and sung by Drake, but this is not allowed. The "AI artist" is harmed --- they could have created something valuable in the world, but this is not allowed. Drake artificially benefits from a regulatory monopoly. Everyone is strictly worse off because of arbitrary, draconian rules. A much better example is drug patents. Literally millions of lives could be saved --- and at a lower cost --- if patents didn't exist. Patents and intellectual property are just state-sanctioned monopolies where everyone is harmed and coerced to pay rent to some random asshole.
- bjt2n3904 3y ago
  Drake's voice isn't intellectual property, it's his own identity. Drake has a right to decide what his voice says, and have a monopoly on it. The AI artist is not "harmed" because they can't use Drake's voice. I can't believe this needs to be said.

paulcole 3y ago

> IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) but that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard. The lyrics are semi-auto-biographical about The Weeknd and Drake. The guy who wrote this didn't date Selena Gomez. It's pretty uninteresting as a song if it's not from The Weeknd and Drake.

alexb_ 3y ago

Not quite - the voices afiak are pure AI with the tuning, pitch, etc done in post. Essentially treating the vocal signature of someone as if it was an instrument. And pretty much everyone knew the beat and lyrics weren't AI generated, at least from what I've seen. This is going viral after there was a viral trend of people replacing songs with Kanye West AI, so people knew what was happening. The impressive part is that the voices could be very convincing. That's what made it shareable.

forrestbrazeal 3y ago
| the voices afiak are pure AI with the tuning, pitch, etc done in post. That's what I thought at first too, but the available info suggests that the AI "autotune" was done on a human reference vocal. (cf https://twitter.com/rpnickson/status/1647603043851026433 https://twitter.com/rpnickson/status/1647603043851026433)

samstave 3y ago

just wait until the music industry elites start to recognize this... This was predicted (as so many other things have) in anime... Recall JEM? the soft-core-USA-version of anime? but so many things have been predicted/projected through anime (art)... the cyberpunk future of holographic AI media pieces has been a long trope in anime... at some point, youth will not care if its AI (EDM? YO!) and will just accept deepfake AI generated content along with AI generated sexually apealing rockstars... What was not predicted in anime, but will become a reality is the personalization of the 'messenger' where we listen to the same song, but mine is personalized to me, and you, yours. so if, say, female, the song may be talored to being delivered to you differently than to male... however, that doesnt mean the delivery is based on gender... there will be subtle differences in timbre tone and rythm based on you....

Tronno 3y ago
> the personalization of the 'messenger' where we listen to the same song, but mine is personalized to me, and you Dynamically generated, personalized content already exists in the form of video games. Yet it is not notable when an NPC remarks on my unique gear, achievements, etc. Technology may eventually enable easier remixing of art to personal tastes. However, this has also existed as long as art itself. What people look for in the artist is their uniquely curated tastes, human connection to the person themselves, and a sense of community with fellow fans. A machine that creates everything for everyone can provide none of these. Its output will be products, not art. It will have customers, not fans.
- nonbirithm 3y ago
  > What people look for in the artist is their uniquely curated tastes, human connection to the person themselves, and a sense of community with fellow fans. Some people do, some people don't. There's nothing obligating an anime/SNS art hoarder to think this way, and if all they ever do is consume the end product without giving a thought to how the artist laid down the individual strokes that made the picture or how the artist's circle of friends and life story influenced their style, there's no consequences. The artist and other people with a similar mindset are unable to criticize these consumers because their behavior is invisible. When AI artists started appearing with art featuring blatantly copied styles, they did finally become open to such criticism. I have a feeling the nature of endless feeds with a practically infinite amount of art to consume has conditioned a lot of consumers to never have think about the human artist. They can just look at the stash in their Pictures folder and think "that's a cute X" divorced from the artistic context that's been integral in earlier art history. The consequences of this are only starting to become apparent right now. But I think if there were nothing like Stable Diffusion then one would be unable to tell apart the people who would be open to copying artists' styles with a hypothetical AI program to-be-invented in the future from people who wouldn't. They'd all just appear to be the same breed of fans. It was the invention of the technology and its spread that revealed those preferences.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Do you have any reason to believe people thought that? Everyone I talked to thought it was a human generated song with an autotune like drake ai filter on the lyrics.

forrestbrazeal 3y ago
Yes, many people assumed this. Here's the first example I found (scroll through the thread for many more): https://twitter.com/Russ_Wilcox/status/1647602468623114240 https://twitter.com/Russ_Wilcox/status/1647602468623114240 (Note that this guy was smart enough to ask the question - imagine how many people saw "AI-generated song" and just uncritically assumed a computer spat out the whole thing, chatGPT-style)
giarc 3y ago
I thought it was all AI generated.....
JohnFen 3y ago
This is what I thought -- but I also haven't heard the song.

poisonarena 3y ago

Do you have anything to back this up? a few days EARLIER this was released in Israel by KAN (television chanel).. I know you probably can't speak hebrew but here is a song made (vocals/lyrics/music) by AI, of two dead singers who are very famous in Israel (Zohar Argov and Ofra Haza).. It is convincing https://youtu.be/7ND1Pw6QD_0 https://youtu.be/7ND1Pw6QD_0 I think if it wasn't in hebrew language(and to be honest, Israeli) it would have been on HackerNews or at least on reddit somewhere. There is also some really good ones of Curt Cobain. The AI group is a Tel Aviv startup calle Aiode.

tivert 3y ago

> I believe a big reason this song blew up on social media was that it was misleadingly hyped as an "AI-generated song". I expect many people thought that AI composed and recorded the (reasonably idiomatic) music and lyrics. IIRC, I read that in the 70s many people thought Popcorn by Hot Butter was also written by a computer, but it was just played on (analog) synthesizers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_(instrumental) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_(instrumental) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK3ZP6frAMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK3ZP6frAMc

spaceman_2020 3y ago

I produce music but can’t sing to save my life. If I had access to an on-demand pitch perfect AI singer, I would likely release way more of my music to the public.

grepfru_it 3y ago
https://www.vocaloid.com/en/ https://www.vocaloid.com/en/ I just ask you don't forget about the little people when you become famous
JohnFen 3y ago
> pitch perfect AI singer Just don't actually have it sing in a pitch-perfect manner. That's uninteresting.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
The thing with musicians are that there are so many talented musicians out there who can straight up show up and sight read a complex piece they never played before and put it on a record. Many who will work for free or close to it as a result of this saturation of talent. You could probably go on instagram and book a singer for your work by the afternoon.
- pie420 3y ago
  that's the thing. something that would take 4+ hours and $100 or more can now be done for free in under an hour.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    That depends on if its faster to come up with the prompts to sing the song you are imagining in your head as a producer versus just hiring a cheap singer. Sometimes yes sometimes no I’d expect is the answer to this question, and given uncertainty some people do pay extra for certainty. Musicians pay extra for marginal quality gains too. If it was all just a race to the bottom all fender and gibsons would be made in China because no one cares, but thats not the case. American models that are sonically almost the same sometimes as a cheaper made in japan or thailand model command premiums due to the perceived quality.

msla 3y ago

It's been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter The story is that there was a program, Racter, which allegedly created a book titled "The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed" back in the 1980s. The book was released and was a hit primarily because of that AI connection, and a version of Racter was also sold. However, the Racter that got released could never have composed the book, leading me to this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34575252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34575252 > The least hypothesis is that the "good" version of Racter that supposedly composed the novel never existed, and that it was all a hoax made up by someone who wanted to bask in some publicity and sell the Racter that actually got released. As you say, the output is suspiciously good for something they insisted was accomplished on a home computer of the era and, oh no, they can't release the software that did it for Reasons... yeah, pull the other one, it's got bells on.

winternett 3y ago

The tune should have never been uploaded to begin with... I remix artists, but use their actual vocals, and never release remixes that aren't properly cleared... Putting out unauthorized work by others (for profit), especially when it emulates that they actually created the product, can harm their reputation. Putting out unauthorized work from musicians (for profit) often represents that the work was cleared... It's a move to either generate attention for the tool that they used, or for the emulation services they provide as "musicians", or even worse it could be a scam to make money off of putting out counterfeit music... I guess whoever was behind it (and now there will likely be even more of this) figures the legal issues that arise are worth the risk in seeking whatever profit may come from breaking common rules of music production such as this. It's troubling to see this happen as an Indie musician amid the already overly complex scam environment within the music industry.

jeroenhd 3y ago
The legality of doing this depends on either the AI related lawsuits that have already been filed or legislative bodies answering the legal questions through new laws. Copying a voice isn't banned, per se. You can do a perfect impersonation of someone without fear of violating any copyright. Distributing recorded samples, however, is a clear copyright violation. So, does AI merely make an impersonation or is it combining files that you have no right to distribute to form the voice? Are images in the Stable Diffusion dataset partially embedded in the outputs or not? Are the stories ChatGPT writes just weapons grade copyright infringement? It all depends on how many rights we all attribute to the things we stuff into AI datasets. If AI models are ruled to be some kind of special case where the output doesn't violate the copyright if the training dataset, I think AI voice cloning should be completely legal. I believe the music and movie industries will do what they can to get the law on their side, perhaps demanding royalties for every work of theirs in AI datasets. Maybe they'll demand payment per generated work. I believe Universal is already demanding their partners to stop blocking scrapers for use in AI. I have no idea how a judge will rule on this. Based on the little work from professionals I've seen, it could go either way with current copyright laws.

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lancesells 3y ago

> IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) but that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard. I haven't listened to the song in it's entirety or very closely but an actual Drake or Weeknd song usually has much better production and songwriting. Not saying it's not good or that Drake songs are good but from my amateur ear there's a difference in quality.