David Guetta reveals ‘Emin-AI-em’, a deepfake rapper that sounds remarkably like Marshall Mathers

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!”

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.