Fake Drake alert!!!

The song “Heart on My Sleeve,” which was allegedly produced using artificial intelligence to mimic the voices of Drake and The Weeknd, has been the subject of the most discussion in the music industry for the past week. The song was uploaded to TikTok by the user Ghostwriter977. The responses of fans (“This isn’t bad, which is pretty cool!”) and executives (“This isn’t bad, which is really scary!”) were very different, even if most people were impressed. However, as with a lot of online technology, it’s the potential quantity that is truly amazing and terrifying, not the quality.

There wasn’t much damage done by this specific track. Following a request from Universal Music Group, which both Drake and The Weeknd record for, streaming services took it down. “Heart on My Sleeve” has at least one blatant copyright violation in the shape of a Metro Boomin producer tag, which YouTube claims is the reason the song was taken down. It’s not entirely obvious, though, if copying Drake’s voice constitutes copyright infringement, as creators and rights holders would prefer.

Universal claimed that “the training of generative AI using our artists’ music” breached copyright in a statement made public around the time the track was removed. But it’s a little trickier than that. It depends on whether using music to train AI qualifies as fair use; the answer won’t be known until the courts make their decision. Whether that holds true in other nations relies on national legal restrictions on text and data mining, which differ from nation to nation. In either case, though, deliberately copying Drake’s voice would undoubtedly infringe his right to what an American lawyer may refer to as his right of publicity but what a fan is more likely to refer to as his artistic identity.