The Ballad of ‘Deepfake Drake’

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Hey, thanks for having me.

You are a music reporter, that's the world you cover, but this is an episode about artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence. AI is something we've covered a lot on the show, but never when it comes to music. So tell me how these two things came together for you in your recent reporting?

So there's obviously been a lot of buzz about AI in recent months. All across all my social media, television, cover of our newspaper, chatbots and image generators, I'm thinking of Chat GPT. Everyone's saying they're the next big thing. What do they mean for various industries? But in my world, the people who make popular music, fans of popular music, and the people who build businesses around pop music. AI hadn't really been a thing. There had been some experiments with AI on the fringes of the music business over the years, but it always seemed a little bit academic or niche. They weren't really touching mainstream culture, they weren't used by the biggest producers, or it didn't involve the biggest artists. And these are the people that I tend to cover, to write about and to listen to. But then over the last few weeks, there was this massive change. It started, like most things in pop music. On social media. I started to see videos on my feeds on TikTok, on Instagram, on Twitter, and it just really felt like a moment.

Somebody once told me, the world is gonna roll me ♪.

There are memes, they are covers essentially of familiar music, familiar songs and artists, very popular ones, but computer generated too many times before a Beyonce song, Cuff it as sung by A.I Rihanna.

So excited, so excited. I'm a seasoned professional ♪.

Or Kanye West doing Hey there Delilah by the plain white T's Hey there Delilah. What's it like in New York City? I'm a thousand miles away, but girl, tonight you look so pretty. Yes, you do.

So kind of like a deepfake, but for music.

Exactly these a.

Of course, Joe, what's on your mind?

It's just that the weight of the presidency can be a lot to bear. The decisions I make impact the lives of millions of people. And I feel like I'm constantly under a microscope. I know exactly how you feel, Joe. There were times when I felt like the media.

Was always looking for a way to bring me down.

So I feel like the way that the a.

Because there's so many recordings.

Exactly, and it sort of drew people's attention to the possibilities that were starting to become available from this a.

Right, so as people like having fun, just kind of like spoofing or kind of covering. Using their computers, their favorite songs, using voices from their favorite artists from other places.

Yeah, like, what would it be like if Nicki Minaj did a Frank Sinatra song?

What was it like?

I haven't heard that one, thankfully.

Okay, so it's fun, but it's kind of a novelty.

Yeah, you would see these things pop up on Instagram, on TikTok, on Twitter. And they were lightweight, they were harmless, but they sort of foretold all of this potential for how this technology could be used in the music industry.

And who made it, who created this thing?

So it seems to have been seeded across social media and streaming services like YouTube and Spotify by someone calling themselves. Ghostwriter. Ghostwriter is a term in the music industry for someone who works in the shadows in studios, helping big artists come up with their tracks. And then not really getting credit for it.

So this is interesting, so this is different from the Kanye stuff, which was essentially regular people having fun on the internet with a bit of AI, doing spoofs and cover songs. This is actually someone who knows what they're doing, actually composing real music to sound using AI. Like one of the world's most famous artists.

Yeah, what seems to be happening here is that there's a songwriter with enough skills in the studio to write a Drake song that is then using AI technology to make it sound as if Drake is the one performing it.

So do people know it's not Drake?

Most people know that it's not Drake, and part of the novelty factor is that it's being presented as AI. But I think there's enough gray area that people wanna hear it for themselves. And it's a good enough copy that the song starts to snowball and becomes really popular at the end of the weekend. It's gone totally viral, and millions of people have heard it across TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and even Spotify and YouTube, where official streams are counted.

Wow, huh, interesting? So really went viral and has this huge pickup.

Yeah, I think there's a combination of factors. People who think it's a good song and will take a new Drake song, whether or not he actually made it. And also people who wanna hear just how far this AI technology has come.

So then what happens?

All of this plays out over a weekend, which really gives the song space to grow and for its virality to spread far and wide. But by Monday morning, the corporations involved have seemingly had enough. So Universal Music Group, and the one that represents both Drake and the Weeknd, gets this song pulled down from all the official streaming services like Spotify and YouTube.

Huh, okay, how do they do that?

So it's interesting because the legal questions around AI music are still very much unsettled. It's a real gray area. Whether or not impersonating someone's voice is enough to get a song taken down. In the past, there have been some court cases where artists have a right to their likeness to the sound of their own voice. Especially if a copy is being passed off as legitimate, but we haven't really seen this legal precedent applied to AI, so in this case, it seems like they were able to get the song removed. Not because the song is impersonating Drake, but because the producer ghostwriter included a tiny clip of another song that was actually already copyrighted.

So, in fact, it had nothing to do with AI, their ability to take it down.

That's right. It seems like this was just a bit of an unforced error by Ghostwriter to include something that was copyrighted instead of something that was just in this gray area.

But it sounds like, in any case, the party was over.

Yeah, for this particular song at least, but I think overall it was clear that a line had been crossed. And the industry, which had never really had to contend with the idea that AI was a threat to their business. And because they knew more and more, songs like this would keep popping up. So while Heart on my Sleeve may have been gone, the legal and creative questions that it raised were obviously here to stay.

We'll be right back.

I'm Julie Turkowicz, I'm a reporter at The New York Times. I have been trying to understand changes in migration. So I traveled with photographer Federico Rios to the Darien Gap, this hot, mountainous, 70-mile stretch of jungle straddling the border of Colombia and Panama. We're hiking through a river, just like covered in mud. Many used to think that this route was impassable. But thousands have been risking their lives to pass through the Darien, almost all in the hopes of making it to the United States.

So Joe Drake's label, Universal, gets Spotify to take the song down. How are they thinking about this stuff?

Universal didn't address this song specifically, they never mentioned Drake or The Weeknd, and they certainly didn't want to give any attention to Ghostwriter. But they do release this statement the day the song gets taken down. And it's this big, sweepy corporate thing that tries to frame this fight as a cosmic battle between good and evil. The statement basically asks people in the music industry and who might use AI, which side of history they want to be? On the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deepfakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation?

Okay, so when you put it like that, that seems pretty straightforward, right? I want to be on the side of artists and human expression.

Yeah, I think Universal sees this from a couple of different angles. The music producers using Drake's sound and his celebrity to make money, they want to be making money off of Drake. They also don't want these AI tools to be able to learn from the music that Drake and the Weeknd and their ilk have already put out. That's copyrighted material.

But can they even control that? I mean, tell the computers of the world that they can't scrape the internet to listen to Drake songs because the Drake songs are copyrighted. I mean, they're just out there, right?

That's true, but they can try. I've compared the rise in AI music to file sharing, to napster. And these were issues for the labels back in the day, where they got caught a little bit flat-footed. Every time there's a rise in new technology, the labels want to find a way to get in on it. But in the meantime, they have to sort of play whack-a-mole, with people doing it on their own.

Huh, interesting? So they're not just going around trying to get stuff taken down.

That's exactly right.

So tell me about that, Joe. Like, how is AI being used to make music more broadly?

There's a few different categories of what we're calling generative AI music. What we don't have just yet is an AI bot that can create a song from a simple text prompt. Where you would say, Make me a song by Drake in the weekend, and it would spit the whole thing back out at you. Wholesale. What we do have are tools that professional musicians and even amateur musicians in their bedrooms can use in bits and pieces. Songwriters could use a chat bot like ChatGBT to come up with lyrics in the style of another artist, or a producer could use AI technology to create little loops of a guitar riff, for instance, or a drum beat or a horn sound.

I'm getting lost in an underground.

This is the future. Rave sound I'm Getting Lost In An Underground was one by the French DJ David Guetta, who had used AI to make an Eminem song. There's something that I made as a joke and it works so good I could not believe it. I discovered those websites that are about AI.

This is the future rave sound. I'm getting lost in an underground.

That's right, but the key distinction here is that David Guetta wasn't trying to sell his song. He sees this as an artistic experiment, but he's not putting it on Spotify where it can make actual money.

And what do artists think about this, like Eminem and others who were being used in this way, or Drake, for that matter?

Drake hasn't commented specifically.

But they were okay with that, just like giving away their voice like that.

I think they realized that this is happening, whether they like it or not, and they wanna see what people can pull off. It reminds me of the beginnings of sampling in hip hop, where disco records all of a sudden become the basis for a completely new genre.

Right, and at the time, that felt pretty radical.

Yeah, and innovation often comes out of people breaking the rules or doing things that make people or corporations feel uncomfortable. But Grimes is saying that if people do make money off of her voice, she should be paid a cut. So she's trying to get ahead of the business problems. I think the risks come when you realize that with Grimes voice as a tool, you could make it sound like she's saying or feeling anything you want. This raises all sorts of questions about identity and creativity, and cultural appropriation.

Right?

There are critics who see these vocal fakes as yet another form of digital blackface. You can put the words of a white creator into the mouth of a Black artist.

Say more about that.

I mean, the history of American popular music is full of appropriation, specifically white artists who take, borrow and steal from Black artists. I mean, rock and roll, Elvis, the Rolling Stones success of certain white rappers, that's always been there. So the uncomfortable thing about this technology is that it could allow for a much easier way of impersonating people. One thing an artist brings to the table is their identity, their culture, their biography.

Right, life, experience, identity, culture like these are some of the things that make music human, right? And if you take those things out of the music, then what is it?

I think that's ultimately what worries and interests me the most about these AI technologies in general right now. Maybe it's just a vocal impersonation, but what about when AI is writing the lyrics and the melody and impersonating a human wholesale? For me, I'm a music reporter and a fan, I'm obsessed with the people who are creating this stuff. What I'm looking for is the human being behind the music. If they sound angry or sad, or confident, or in love.

Thank you, Joe, thank you.

Thank you.

We'll be right back.

Welcome to the show. My guests today say they've been keeping a secret from a loved one far too long.

Now, even though Springer's wildly popular program, The Jerry Springer Show, set a new standard for tawdryness on American television. He encouraged everyday people to make shocking confessions, engage in high drama screaming matches, and get in regular fistfights on stage.