A music featuring familiar voices of famous artistes Drake and Weeknd went viral on social media platforms like TikTok and climbed the Spotify chart last week. But the song 'Heart on my sleeve' was not sung by the two artists. It was created with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by an anonymous TikTok user. In September last year, Lucasfilm created James Earl Jones' voice as the Start Wars movie character Darth Vader. The company could create the exact voice of Darth Vader with the help from Ukrainian software called Respeecher – a voice cloning product.
The latest episode of creating voice of singers using AI has created multitudes of debates in the music industry. While the AI technology could be used to immortalise any character of cinema or voice of a singer, it could virtually kill the musical career of many. While robots have started their jobs as news readers in countries like China and Japan and ChatGPT scored high in graduate-level exams at various universities in the USA, the rapid advancements in chatbots and other AI tools are likely to replace human beings from many jobs and even recreation like photography, cartoon and gaming.
Until early 2000s, the musician and singers could sell their albums, earn royalties from radio and television, perform on-stage and sell merchandise items bearing their or bands' names.
But the fast developments in computing, mobile and wireless technology changed the scene within a decade. Albums have become a thing of the past while revenue from the mass media channels like radio and television has begun to go down as people are attracted to the internet and consume the music free of cost from YouTube. However, platforms like Spotify pay the royalties to the music production companies. In such situation, if singers voices were created by an AI technology and robots were used to sing it on the stage, it will be the end of music creation by human being. It could create AI or robot stars in music industry.
Likewise, the AI has raised the question of intellectual property rights (IPR) of the original musician and singer. Especially in a country like Nepal where IPR infringement is not considered a serious crime, artistes would face another challenge to make sure that the revenue generated by their creation reach them.
Some famous cases of IPR and royalty demand include team of folk song led by Basanta Thapa demanding royalty from the stage show in Australia performed by the top contestants of Nepal Idol where they sang his song 'Saal ko paat ko tapari huni', film maker Shambhu Pradhan winning intellectual property case against the makers of movie 'Kri' for a song 'Yetti yeti paani' which was settled in more than a million rupees, and unauthorised use of music in advertisement and other promotional communication.
There are solutions as well. One of such is prescribed by musician Grimes aka Claire Boucher. She has invited the creators to use AI-generated version of her voice and make music and asked 50 per cent of the total royalties generated by such creations. She went a step further by promising to provide her raw audio files. However, this idea couldn't be applied for the artistes who have sold the rights of their music or have any other legal bindings. There would certainly be a problem over the right on the royalties among the singer, marketer and other parties. But still, the question is would other artistes join Grimes to be a 'guinea pig' for the AI music projects?
Published in The Rising Nepal daily on 1 May 2023.
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