AI Music

Submission 2,181

Part of a series on AI / Artificial Intelligence. [View Related Entries]

About

AI Music, also known as AI-generated Music or Artificial Intelligence Songs, refers to music that was generated by artificial intelligence systems. In late 2022, text-to-music (text2music) applications like Mubert AI and Riffusion launched on GitHub. Starting in early 2023, AI-generated songs began going viral online as they replicated the voices and lyrics of real-life musicians, for instance, the AI Drake x The Weeknd song "Heart On My Sleeve" that was posted to TikTok in April 2023. The track, and AI Song Covers, were made with a combination of ElevenLabs (to make an AI Voice) and ChatGPT (to write AI-generated lyrics). Going into mid-2023, viral discourse ensued about the ramifications of AI-generated music, including a tweet from Grimes about potentially receiving royalties on any AI song that used her voice and took inspiration from her lyrics.

Online History

Applications

ChucK

Starting in the early 2000s, computer scientists began working on real-time synthesis and composition systems for music, starting in 2002 with Princeton's ChucK.^[1] The program was designed by Ge Wang as a Princeton graduate student working with Perry R. Cook and was distributed freely on both Mac iOS and Windows. ^[2] On February 27th, 2007, Ge Wang uploaded a demo of ChucK to YouTube^[3] that was originally made in 2006, gaining roughly 28,100 views in 16 years (shown below).

Jukedeck

In 2012, a British company called Jukedeck was founded by Patrick Stobbs and Ed Rex.^[4] The program was advertised as a way to AI-generate royalty-free music.^[4] In December 2015, Jukedeck launched on an accessible website and the two CEOs appeared at a London Tech Crunch event to promote the new website (shown below).^[5] Years later, in 2019, Jukedeck was then bought by ByteDance (TikTok's parent company) for an undisclosed sum.^[6]

OpenAI's Jukebox

On April 30th, 2020, OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) released its AI-generated music system called Jukebox.^[7] The program organically generated music, including lyrics, when given a genre and artist to base it on.^[8] Usage of the program went viral on May 1st, 2020, when YouTuber^[9] ASmolBoy posted a video that used Jukebox to extend Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." Over the course of three years, the video gained roughly 6.7 million views and 245,000 likes (shown below).

Memetic Usage

AI Drake / AI Kanye / AI Playboi Carti

Starting in 2021, musicians began to use AI voice applications to generate the voices of rappers, as well as lyrics from AI chatbots to create songs with their own production. For instance, on October 4th, 2021, YouTuber^[10] EdTalenti uploaded a video called, "Using A.I to Collab with Legendary Rappers," in which he used the applications Uberduck AI and Jarvis Lyrics to make songs with the voices of Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Playboi Carti. Over the course of a year and a half, the video received roughly 669,400 views and 30,000 likes (shown below).

Going into 2023, AI voice generators became more seamless and commonplace, namely, ElevenLabs AI became widely available, resulting in many AI voice memes such as AI Presidents Gaming. The availability also resulted in more AI-generated rap songs. For example, on March 14th, 2023, YouTuber^[11] kanye university uploaded a video in which Kanye's voice was covering Ice Spice's song "Boy's a Liar Pt. 2," gaining roughly 150,800 views in one month (shown below, left).

In April 2023, TikToker^[12] @ghostwriter977 uploaded an original AI-generated Drake x The Weeknd song titled "Heart on My Sleeve," which received mass attention before its eventual deletion (YouTube reupload shown below).

Viral Discourse

Grimes' Statement on AI Music

On April 23rd, 2023, Grimes posted a tweet to her Twitter^[13] account @Grimezsz that included a screenshot of a New York Times^[14] article called, "An A.I. Hit of Fake ‘Drake’ and ‘The Weeknd’ Rattles the Music World." Grimes stated in the tweet that she'd "split 50 percent royalties on any successful AI-generated song that uses [her] voice." Over the course of one day, the tweet gained roughly 20,700 likes (shown below), as well as news coverage from Business Insider^[15] and others.