An article authored by Ed Russavage and Summer Associate, Benjamin Nickerson titled “AI: The Voices Behind the Music” was published in IPWatchdog.
AI has progressed within the last several years to do remarkable things. In February of this year, OpenAI unveiled Sora, an impressive text-to-video AI generator that produces high quality videos. This new generative AI innovation uses basic text prompts to generate up to 60-second videos. Like all generative AI tools, there are concerns about how the model is trained and the composition of the training data. The potential ethical and societal ramifications for a tool such as this may be cause for alarm, as there are certainly IP concerns that must be addressed before the tool is distributed for public use. OpenAI has started a dialogue with lawmakers and artists as a result.
Hey AI, Make Me A Song by My Favorite Artist…
Text-to-video is not the only innovation to come out of the recent generative AI wave. AI can impersonate musical artists’ voices with surprising accuracy. In April of 2023, an AI-generated song mimicking vocals of Drake and the Weeknd was uploaded to streaming and social media platforms. The song quickly went viral, amassing over 11 million views on YouTube and over 600,000 streams on Spotify. Thousands of users used the song in TikTok videos, and it is estimated that approximately $9,400 was made off of global streams. However, neither Drake nor the Weeknd authorized the use of their vocals on the song. Read more.