General Intelligence

Deepfake Music Is So Good It Might Be Illegal

And other fascinating A.I. research from this week

Dave Gershgorn
OneZero
Published in
3 min readMay 1, 2020

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Photo illustration. Image: Frank Ramspott/Getty Images

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.

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Dave Gershgorn
OneZero

Senior Writer at OneZero covering surveillance, facial recognition, DIY tech, and artificial intelligence. Previously: Qz, PopSci, and NYTimes.