Should We Be Worried About Deepfake Songs?

The latest collaboration between Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd, titled Heart on my sleeve, a paen to actress Selena Gomez, has gone viral, largely because neither Drake nor Abel Makkonen Tesfaye have anything to do with the recording. Instead, the track was recorded by somebody calling themselves @ghostwriter, who claims that the song has been created using generative algorithms trained with the voices of the two.

At the time of writing, the song was back on YouTube: the original uploaded by @ghostwriter was taken down yesterday after a copyright infringement claim by Universal Music Group, which owns the rights to the performers’ creations (and about a third of the rights to the global music market). We can now expect a long and fruitless online chase, because according to them, that’s what they have to do to ensure that their intellectual property rights are respected. The song is completely synthetic, both music and lyrics, and the sound quality is less than impressive: there are moments when the voices do not sound as they should and part of the lyrics are lost. Fans of the two singers are already calling for them to record the song “for real”.

What to do in a world where technology can mimic virtually anything, from a voice to an image to a video? It would be interesting to know, first of all, how many artists are thinking “this is an outrage” and how many, instead, are taking an interest in the technology to use it themselves. I have been using deepfakes in my classes for a long time now of Mark Zuckerberg supposedly saying he has stolen all his users’ data and belongs to Spectra; as well as others of Barack Obama saying what’s on Jordan Peele’s mind, and even one of me singing opera. The technology is is now so easy to use: training an algorithm to speak or sing like me once required around 15 minutes of recordings; it can now be done with three seconds. For something like this to happen and go viral was no longer a question of technology, but simply of the time it took for someone to think about doing it.

Where now? The same as ever. Scarlett Johansson despaired more than five years ago and said that fighting against deepfakes was a lost cause and it was a waste of time trying to remove all the pornographic videos online using her image, so we might as well admit that porn has always been an early adopter of technology, and secondly, that anyone who is minimally well-known, is likely to find themselves being deepfaked. It is even possible that we’ll see a repeat of what happened with downloads two decades ago: they will become a metric of popularity, and that the most deepfaked artists will be the ones who end up earning the most money. But as always, that will depend on the maturity all those involved assume the technological context and its consequences.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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