General Intelligence
Deepfake Music Is So Good It Might Be Illegal
And other fascinating A.I. research from this week
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Welcome to General Intelligence, OneZero’s weekly dive into the A.I. news and research that matters.
A.I.-generated music is finally good.
This week, a programmer mimicked Jay-Z’s voice and cadence so effectively that his agency, Roc Nation, got SoundCloud to take the track down. Then, yesterday, OpenAI released Jukebox, an algorithmic system able to generate music — complete with lyrics — in the style of famous musicians like Elvis and Frank Sinatra.
Essentially, these algorithms analyze large collections of an artist’s songs, find patterns in the audio data that humans would correlate with hallmarks of music style, and then use those patterns to generate new audio.
Some of these generated songs are incredibly good. One sample, found embedded on OpenAI’s website, is a Christmas song about being in a hot tub, sung in the style of Frank Sinatra.
Here’s a sampling of the lyrics:
It’s Christmas time, and you know what that means,
Ohh, it’s hot tub time!
As I light the tree, this year we’ll be in a tub,
Ohh, it’s hot tub time!
Looks like there’s a new Sultan of Swoon.
But these algorithmic reimaginings of artists’ styles raise complex legal questions. Amanda Levendowski, a professor at Georgetown Law and founding director of its Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic, says that while, at first look, the Jay-Z situation may look like a copyright issue regarding the data used to create the voice, it’s actually closer in spirit to prior legal cases of human impersonators.
Levendowski pointed to one case from 1988, when the Ford Motor Company made an advertisement that mimicked the voice of singer and actress Bette Midler, using a…
