David Guetta has had countless guest vocalists on his records, but Eminem has never been one of them. The solution? Enlist the help of AI technology and create a ‘deep fake’ Slim Shady to perform for you.
Guetta’s wheeze was revealed on Twitter, where he posted a video and quipped: “Let me introduce you to… Emin-AI-em”.
The clip was filmed during one of Guetta’s live shows, and features a voice that sounds remarkably like Eminem saying “this is the future rave sound, I’m getting off in the underground.”
“Eminem bro! There’s something I made as a joke. And it worked so good I could not believe it,” Guetta explained. “I discovered those websites that are about AI; basically, you can write lyrics in the style of any artist you like. So I typed ‘write a verse in the style of Eminem about future rave. And I went to another AI website that can recreate the voice. I put the text in that and I played the record and people went nuts!”
Let me introduce you to… Emin-AI-em 👀 pic.twitter.com/48prbMIBtvFebruary 3, 2023
Guetta went on to clarify that “obviously I won’t release this commercially,” but we suspect that soundalike AI rappers and singers could prove to be a legal minefield going forward. Just last month, Rick Astley filed a lawsuit against hip-hop artist Yung Gravy, alleging that the 26-year-old rapper impersonated his voice without legal authorisation in the 2022 single Betty (Get Money). What happens when technology makes it easy to create a ‘singer’ that sounds exactly like someone else?
The truth is that the worlds of music and AI are now colliding with alarming regularity. Google recently made headlines with MusicLM, a new AI model that appears to do a remarkable job of creating lengthy pieces of music based on simple text prompts, and there’s a possibility that AI sound generators such as Audiolab’s Emergent Drums could soon render samples redundant.
If you’re not quite keeping up with all this, fear not: the technology is moving so fast that today’s AI achievements will seem primitive in comparison to what’s still to come.
