Drake commented on a viral video of an AI-generated version of his voice rapping Ice Spice‘s “Munch.”
“This is the final straw, AI,” Drizzy wrote in an Instagram Stories post alongside a repost of the video. The original post, as shared by The Shade Room, also mentions a recent Financial Times report that Universal Music has asked major streaming services to prohibit companies from training their artificial intelligence with music on their platforms.
AI-generated versions of Rihanna singing Beyoncé‘s “Cuff It,” Travis Scott rapping Pop Smoke’s “For the Night,” and Kanye West singing Justin Bieber‘s “Love Yourself” were also included in the post.
Drake and Ice Spice have a history, as the Canadian rapper was one of the first big stars to express his appreciation for her breakthrough song, “Munch.” For whatever reason, he later unfollowed her on Instagram, and fans speculated that he dissed her in his song “BackOutsideBoyz.” Whatever happened between them, he refollowed her on Instagram.
Drizzy’s post comes just a few days after Nicki Minaj appeared on Ice Spice’s “Princess Diana.”
There has been growing concern about the use of AI to copy people’s voices, and prolific audio engineer and producer Young Guru has repeatedly expressed his concerns about AI’s worrying power with fake Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar verses. Meanwhile, Google has created MusLM, a project that can generate music from a description after being trained on over 280,000 hours of music. Due to the obvious risk of copyright issues, the company has not released the project.
UMG is working to prevent these AI models from using copyrighted content to train their algorithms without compensation, which has long concerned creators of all sizes. “We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent unauthorised use of their music and to prevent platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators,” a spokesperson for UMG said. “We anticipate that our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that are detrimental to artists.”