AI Drake already has a viral hit song and is causing mass controversy at the Grammy Awards. Now it just needs to develop a serious hard drug addiction to win the elusive Pop Star Triple Crown.
The music industry has been in the spin cycle this past week over whether or not the viral song "Heart on My Sleeve" by mysterious producer Ghostwriter977 should be eligible for a Grammy considering the "singers" on the track are AI versions of Drake and The Weeknd. Originally, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. indicated the song would be eligible for the Grammys considering it was written by a human, but the organization has now reversed course after learning the AI-generated vocals were "not legally obtained" or properly "cleared by the label or the artists."
There's a lot to unpack there, but let me be clear: this song is categorically fire. It's a fundamentally catchy song that went viral for a reason. Whether it's Grammy eligible or not Grammy eligible or uses AI or doesn't use AI, a good tune is a good tune, and "Heart on My Sleeve" is a good tune.
But it's a "good tune" only because it's not really AI generated. The song is getting a ton of pass pickup because the idea of using AI to create viral songs is music press porn, but AI Drake isn't nearly the man he portrays himself to be. This is not Midjourney or DALL·E where someone opened up a prompt window and typed in, "Make a new hit song by Drake and The Weeknd for me." 99% of "Heart on My Sleeve" is made and recorded by a human, and that is a human voice singing the song. Literally all the AI Drake and AI The Weeknd models are doing is taking the previously recorded vocals of the song and changing the timbre and sound of those vocals to sound like Drake and The Weeknd. That's it. These aren't AI-generated vocals as much as AI-shaped vocals. We shouldn't blow out of proportion the capabilities of this technology. A fully AI-generated new song right now still sucks even if an AI-shaped new song can be fire.
In general, I'm all for the use of AI as a tool to make even better music. There will be plenty of purists that talk about how using AI to write songs is a "grotesque mockery of what it is to be human," but listen to an EDM track. Listen to the instrumental of any top 40 hit today. The train requiring all elements of a recorded song to be made by humans left the platform decades ago. Using the computer to generate the vocals is just one final step further in my mind. I'm not going to sit here and bet on AI single-handedly uprooting the Billboard Hot 100 next year; there's going to be far more bad AI-generated songs in the short term than good ones. But I'm not overtly offended by the idea.
But just like with samples and melody interpolations, we still need to make sure we're crediting and paying artists when their works are directly utilized and incorporated into a new piece of art, and if Ghostwriter977 used an AI model that was trained on uncleared vocal samples, then I think the Recording Academy is making the right call by disqualifying "Heart on My Sleeve" from award consideration. The rules need to exist because the rules make the game fun.
I think one of the more immediate effects of all this is going to be younger, undiscovered songwriters slapping AI Drake onto their own original songs and posting the result, hoping it goes viral and is a boon on their other original work. AI Drake gets you a level of attention that's nearly impossible for musicians to generate organically, and so I'm sure a bunch of opportunistic musicians will continue hopping on this AI Drake bandwagon as a self-promotion tool. We're already seeing plenty of that happen as we speak.
So sure, I don't think the technology behind AI Drake is nearly as impressive as some people are portraying it to be, but if using it gets us more tunes like "Heart on My Sleeve," I think I'd be okay with risking the potential AI-driven human annihilation.
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