When The Beatles broke up more than 50 years ago, devastated fans were left yearning for more. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) is offering just that. Recently, the band’s surviving superstar Paul McCartney announced that he has used AI to ‘extricate’ John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to complete a decades-old song, which will also be The Beatles’ final.
The new creations show how far this technology has come but also raise a host of ethical and legal questions.
Like ‘Heart on a sleeve’, a track which featured AI-generated vocals of Drake and The Weeknd, most of the AI covers use scraping technology that studies and captures the nuances of a particular voice.
The creators would have probably then sung the parts themselves and then applied the cloned voice, like placing a filter on a photograph. But getting there isn’t simple and requires skilled human operators combining new AI tools with extensive knowledge of traditional music processing software, Zohaib Ahmed, the CEO of Resemble AI, a Toronto-based voice cloning company, said.
For Patricia Alessandrini, a composer and assistant professor at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, the recent spate of AI tracks represent a coming-of-age for a technology that has been advancing exponentially yet has largely been out of public view.
When it comes to training “on something existing”, AI does a good job, she said. But it flounders when it comes to new ideas. “There’s really no expectation that it’s going to replace the rich history of humans pioneering art and culture,” Patricia said.
But for the music industry, the ramifications are enormous. As the technology progresses, software that will easily allow people to transform their vocals into one of their favourite singers is likely not far away.
“If they’re getting paid for their vocal license, hey, everyone’s happy. But what if they’ve long since passed away?” asked YouTuber Steve Onotera.
AI has already created a helter-skelter impact in the copyright world. In the case of ‘Heart on a sleeve’, Universal Music Group was quick to assert copyright claims and have the track pulled down from streaming services, but that hasn’t stopped it from popping back up on small accounts.
Marc Ostrow, a music copyright lawyer from New York, said AI-generated music is a “grey area”. Copyright can be asserted both by songwriters whose material is used, and the holders of the master recordings. On the other hand, AI creators can argue it falls under ‘fair use’ citing a 2015 US court ruling that said Google was permitted to archive the world’s books, because it wasn’t competing with sellers and was displaying only snippets.
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