09 May 2024 09:37
THE ghostwriter – literally “ghost writers” – are people who, for work, write texts, songs, books, articles, essays. By contract they always remain in the shadows: their works, in fact, are attributed to much more famous people who earn much more. Ghostwriter977 is probably the pseudonym of a ghost writer in the music industry who has never revealed his identity, “paid little or nothing just so that the major labels profit from it”, as he (or she) himself declared.
On April 4, 2023, when for most people generative artificial intelligences were still a mysterious object for insiders – there had already been the case of the images of the Pope with the white down jacket, but little else -, ghostwriter977 produced and then published on various online platforms a song entitled Heart on my sleeve. The vocals of the song are sung by Drake and The Weeknd, two Canadian rappers. But their voices are simulated by an AI.
The song, whose creation certainly requires professional knowledge in the field of music production, has totaled 600 thousand plays on Spotify, 275 thousand on YouTube and 15 million plays on TikTok. Then it was removed from all platforms at the request of Universal music group (Umg), Drake’s record company. In the absence of rules on generative artificial intelligence, the only reason why Umg was able, at least initially, to request and obtain the removal of the song is that in Heart on my sleeve there is an unauthorized sampling of another song.
But we are in the age of the internet and the viral reproducibility of anything: since then, in fact, the song continues to be reuploaded online, deleted and reuploaded again, multiplying. It is impossible to stop this process; it’s also impossible to know how many people have listened to the song. You can do it too (here, for example, and if the link doesn’t work, just search for it on YouTube).
A year later, we are in the middle of a rap battle fought with dissing – the songs with which exponents of the hip-hop world attack each other. The object of the dispute? The New York Times sums it up this way: “Who is the current holder of the hip-hop crown: Drake or Kendrick Lamar?”
Rap battles consist of bars (verses) against other rappers, in your own songs or those of other artists. In one of these songs, Like that, in March 2023 Lamar brings up Drake. The Canadian rapper responds with Push ups. Some online are wondering if it’s a real Drake song or if it was made with an artificial intelligence, but speculation ends when a high-quality version of the song appears on Drake’s official account with Universal’s approval.
Lamar responds back with One shot. Only then it turns out that it wasn’t him, but a young rapper from Los Angeles who then explained in detail how he did it. We arrive at April 19, 2024: Drake releases a song entitled Taylor made freestyle, featuring Snoop Dogg and one of the most famous rappers in history, Tupac Shakur. Except that Tupac Shakur died in 1996, murdered with four gunshots – his story, of violence suffered and inflicted, of activism, poetry and crimes, trials and prison, is still current: the trial of the alleged murderer is not started yet -, and his voice in Drake’s song is not the result of a remix or a sampling. She is simulated by a generative artificial intelligence. This probably also applies to that of Snoop Dogg (who would have given his approval to the publication).
If there is a place in musical culture where the use of artificial intelligence can find fertile ground, that place is precisely the hip-hop world: not only are the songs that make up these remote clashes not found on the official accounts of record companies but they are proposed more freely, a bit like the production of ghostwriter977. In addition, hip hop is also a natural incubator for everything that is remixing, remaking, reworking. That’s exactly what you can do with AI.
But not everyone is happy about it. The Tupac estate, which manages the rights to Tupac’s works and his estate, asked Drake to remove the song from his accounts: the rapper gave in.
Despite this, Taylor made freestyle you can still hear it everywhere.
There is a detail that is worth adding: the Shakur estate, after the death of the rapper’s mother, is in the hands of Tom Walley, former CEO of a major label, Warner Music Records. In 2022, Shakur’s sister sued Walley, accusing him of embezzling millions of dollars for her own benefit.
Finally, on Tuesday 30 April 2024 Lamar publishes a six-minute song on his YouTube profile. Is titled Euphoria. After saying that Drake’s impersonation is making Tupac turn in his grave, the rapper wonders, “Am I fighting a ghost or an AI?”
We could add a bar in which we ask ourselves whether those fighting generative AI are fighting for ghostwriters or for cash.
This text is taken from the Artificiale newsletter.
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