Fake Drake
What next for music?
Get smarter every day: Every day Refind picks 5 articles that make you smarter, tailored to your interests. Loved by 200,000+ curious minds. Sign up.
Friends,
If you have 3 hours, I’d recommend this conversation between Manolis Kellis and Lex Friedman. Or if you are playing catchup, then check out the ChatGPT cheat sheet or 28 Artificial Intelligence Terms You Need to Know
News of the week (just to keep you up) includes:
Microsoft reportedly working on its own AI chips that may rival Nvidia’s
OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over
I’d like to touch today on probably the biggest issue that the music industry will face over the coming years - that of AI Artists. Granted, streaming probably knocked music to the ropes, but this is a sucker punch. This week Fake Drake got banned - it was an AI version of a song that was concocted by AI and emulated Drake ft The Weeknd. Although a song such as "Heart on My Sleeve" may only be a short-term sensation after being removed from streaming services this week, the legal and creative issues it brings up will have a long-lasting impact. You might catch the last version here before it gets taken down.
The viral success of "Heart on My Sleeve" has brought to the forefront a conversation that has intensified in the music industry lately. The song, which went viral on social media platforms such as TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube before it was removed, was created using generative artificial intelligence technology. It is part of a grey-area genre of homemade tracks that conjure familiar sounds that can be passed off as authentic. Corporations have grown concerned about such content as A.I. models learn from and dilute copyrighted material. The success of "Heart on My Sleeve" on official streaming services intensified the alarms already ringing in the music business. The largest major label, Universal Music Group, has raised intellectual property concerns, asking "which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud, and denying artists their due compensation.” It’s a bold stance - and one that is needed.
While artists and their labels are confident that the social and emotional component of fandom will separate the work of the real Drake from a fake one - perhaps that of real events or communication through social channels, even if an A.I. version can nod at emotional preoccupations and musical nuance, royalty-free music generators can be used now to compose a rap beat, a commercial jingle, or a film score, cutting into an already fragile economy for working musicians. As generative A.I. rapidly improves across text, images, sound, and video, experts say the technology could reshape creative industries at all levels, with fans, artists, and the systems that govern them having to adjust to new norms on the fly. I can see new AI artists that play on the most popular traits of artists, starting to dominate the charts.
The success of "Heart on My Sleeve," uploaded by an anonymous user called ghostwriter, has helped bring music to the forefront of a conversation that has intensified lately around other mediums like content and education, especially since the release of Open AI’s ChatGPT language model and image generators like DALL-E. However, courts and lawmakers are only beginning to sort out questions of ownership when it comes to A.I., and copyrights in music can be complicated as it is. As I have said before, protected intellectual property can only be created by humans, but what about when musicians collaborate with machines? Perhaps this first clamp-down was something to be expected - but I think it’s the first of many to come until copyright becomes clear.
One only needs to need search on TikTok to find a plethora of voice swaps. Biggie and Tupac singing Jay-Z and Kanye. It’s gonna get messy. It’s OK if Darth Vader sign over his rights, but if you haven’t then where does the line stop? From a legal standpoint, music and AI litigation is still in its infancy, and dizzying questions remain about the amount of human intervention needed to make AI-generated musical works copyrightable. There are also enormous ethical issues to contend with, such as the risk of generating lyrics that are controversial and potentially damaging to a singer's reputation. Some artists believe that rather than lawyers, they should create guardrails around how AI is used for music production and sharing.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
PS. India is now officially the world's most populous nation
Here are my recommendations for this week:
Now
A Two-Minute Burnout Checkup - Burnout is the result of chronic stress and, at work, that stress tends accumulate around your experiences of workload, values, reward, control, fairness, and community. If any are lacking or out of sync, you may be headed toward exhaustion, cynicism, and the feeling of being ineffective. When taken regularly, this short assessment can help you gauge whether you’re on the path to burnout, and where you should focus your attention to make beneficial changes.
35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now - A.I. models have snaked their way into many people’s everyday lives. Despite their flaws, ChatGPT and other A.I. tools are helping people to save time at work, to code without knowing how to code, to make daily life easier or just to have fun. It goes beyond everyday fiddling: In the last few years, companies and scholars have started to use A.I. to supercharge work they could never have imagined, designing new molecules with the help of an algorithm or building alien-like spaceship parts. Here’s how 35 real people are using A.I. for work, life, play and procrastination. Also see AI overtaking domestic chores could close gender gap and ‘I’ve Never Hired A Writer Better Than ChatGPT’: How AI Is Upending The Freelance World
The Amazing Story of How Philly Cheesesteaks Became Huge in Lahore, Pakistan - immigration patterns and global politics — plus a bit of serendipity — intertwined to make the iconic sandwich a hit in the 13-million-resident megalopolis.
The Incredible Story of How Nike Signed LeBron James - Thought AIR was wild? Try a three-way battle between Reebok, Nike, and Adidas for the King's first sneaker.
When Did Our Personal Lives Get So Professional? - The ubiquity of corporate organizational tools means how we manage our work and private time often doesn’t look that different. Is that bad?
Next
Get smarter every day: Every day Refind picks 5 articles that make you smarter, tailored to your interests. Loved by 200,000+ curious minds. Sign up.
GPT-4, AGI, and the Hunt for Superintelligence - thanks to the latest large language models (LLMs) from the AI research firm OpenAI, the concept of an artificial general intelligence suddenly seems much less speculative. OpenAI’s latest LLMs—GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and the chatbot/interface ChatGPT—have made believers out of many previous skeptics.
Financial Services Will Embrace Generative AI Faster Than You Think - Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been used in the financial services industry for more than a decade, enabling enhancements that range from better underwriting to improved foundational fraud scores. Generative AI via large language models (LLMs) represents a monumental leap and is transforming education, games, commerce, and more. While traditional AI/ML is focused on making predictions or classifications based on existing data, generative AI creates net-new content. This ability to train LLMs on vast amounts of unstructured data, combined with essentially unlimited computational power, could yield the largest transformation the financial services market has seen in decades. Unlike other platform shifts—internet, mobile, cloud—where the financial services industry lagged in adoption, here we expect to see the best new companies and incumbents embrace generative AI, now. Also see: AI is taking the jobs of Kenyans who write essays for U.S. college students
Snapchat is releasing its AI chatbot to everyone for free - The OpenAI-powered chatbot is also being added to group chats, gaining the ability to make recommendations for things like AR filters, and will soon be able to even generate photos inside Snapchat.
Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart - Chatbots cannot think like humans: They do not actually understand what they say. They can mimic human speech because the artificial intelligence that powers them has ingested a gargantuan amount of text, mostly scraped from the internet.
Patients were told their voices could disappear. They turned to AI to save them - Artificial intelligence can re-create voices that may have otherwise been lost to disease. Also see AI is teaching the Ford Mustang Mach-E how to drive
Every day Refind picks 5 links from around the web that make you smarter and tailored to your interests. Loved by 100k+ curious minds. Sign up here for their free newsletter
If you enjoyed this edition of Box of Amazing, please share and help me grow this group. If you share it on Twitter or LinkedIn, please tag me so that I can thank you.