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Comment by scottiebarnes | Hacker News Reader

So if you train an audio model on say, Eminem's voice, then write some songs and have it perform them...Would this output be legal to publish?

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What's the difference between that and someone else who just happens to sound like Eminem in terms out output?

As long as you don't market yourself as Eminem that should be completely legal.

I suppose so. I'm just imagining these "ghost AI artists" who publish catalogues of music using the audible likeness of more prolific artists.

I know that you could have always just hired an Eminem impersonator and have them lay down tracks...but this technology lets you achieve speed and scale. At least the Eminem impersonator was a real person. This is just a model learned off an artists voice.

> At least the Eminem impersonator was a real person. This is just a model learned off an artists voice.

I fail to see how that has any difference on the output.

We're all fucking doomed. All these "clever" comparisons between AI and human processes (e.g. "training an AI is just like a human learning"), is not elevating AI to the status of a real person. It's degrading real human creations to homogeneous "content" that is increasingly seen as equivalent to what can be churned out by a GPU farm.

50 years from now we'll still be listening to "AI Eminem" while watching "Avengers Midgame 12, The Revengening" and any concept of cultural or artistic expression beyond what will sell next quarter will be dead and buried.

> I'm just imagining these "ghost AI artists" who publish catalogues of music using the audible likeness of more prolific artists.

Possibly so, but who is the market for such a catalogue? I don’t see how the artist is going to lose out.

I’m reminded, though, if the episode of Mad Men where they want to get the Beatles as the soundtrack to an ad, but on finding out that the Beatles won’t do it they try to get some music that sounds similar to the Beatles. Maybe that’s the market.

A New Zealand political party got into trouble for using a "sound alike" of "Lose Yourself" by Eminem in a political advertisement. They licensed the song from a music library but the court determined the song they licensed was too close to the original.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Mile_Style_v_New_Zealand...

Doesn’t sound like a core market for Eminem. I mean, I find it hard to think of use cases where an artist will really lose out in business terms because someone chooses an AI version of their music over the original. In this case I suspect they wouldn’t have really licensed or tried to licence Lose Yourself.

These "ghost artists" sound verbatim is the issue I have. A Drake song recently went viral and had tons of hits only to turn out it was made with AI. Fans could not even tell the difference and I most certainly could not either.

Moreover, a zero shot Eminem might have a vector encoding smaller than the data required to store a fingerprint or small image.

Can you own a few numbers that represent "you"? What if someone reaches those same numbers via vocal impression or simply manually dialing and tuning some knobs and levers?

This brings up the question as to what actually makes us unique.

well, cover bands have to abide by copyright.

I hope smarter minds than myself will somehow figure out a way to square this circle and get heavy restrictions on commercial usage without killing the technology outright.

As far as AI rap goes: Notorious BIG is (by far) my favorite rapper of all time, yet he died in his early 20s with barely any unreleased songs in the vault. For me, as an aging superfan, AI deepfakes have me feeling 15 again - like Biggie is still alive somewhere and dropping covers of other classic rap tracks on YouTube.

I wanted to link an example of an AI Biggie cover of a Nas classic, but the full thing seems to have vanished off YT after getting some press a few weeks back. A Shorts snippet is all I could find quickly.[1]

And if you’re not a fan of old rap, these Michael Jackson[2] and Freddy Mercury[3] “AI cover songs” are absolutely wild.

I just don’t see how this sort of stuff holds zero cultural value. Yes, it’s fake and a cover song to boot - but if the music elicits an emotional response that differs from both “original” artists of the deepfake, isn’t that art?

1. https://youtube.com/shorts/l81JqY2uhEo

2. https://youtu.be/370dSdNRYG4

3. https://youtu.be/XiZtIARF0iM

There's a saying in physics that the field "advances one funeral at a time". I don't understand the impulse to bring back artists of the past like this. At best, it's a hollow pantomime, and at worst it can be tremendously offensive too their memory. Moreover, how will the medium move forward if every new artist has to now compete for mindshare with every artist that lived and died since 1950 or so? Not just their legacy works (which is hard enough) but "new material" cranked out by AI.

I personally agree that AI art is likely a cultural cul-de-sac, but I don’t think our current society has a framework that can exclude it from the art world without inflicting an Emperor Has No Clothes situation on several decades of post-modernist art. So there will be much gnashing of teeth, but ultimately the question posited by AI (“what is Art?”) is too destructive/inconvenient to be answered and the hubbub will eventually go away as AI generation becomes normalized.

Doomerism aside, I think the focus should be on stopping wide scale commercialization of AI generation being packaged as art. I greatly enjoy the dead artist pantomimes, but I certainly don’t want Diddy magicking up a new Biggie single through AI necromancy.

So I believe David Guetta of all people did this at a recent performance.

- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dj-david-guetta-used-eminem-2...

- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pNP1MqmzaZg&pp=ygUWZGF2aWQgZ3V...

Although no longer a copyright violation it would still be misappropriation of likeness, and a violation of his right to publicity.

I've been amused by the WH40k videos narrated by David Attenborough.

There was some discussion about this a few years ago regarding Lyrebird - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182580

In particular, celebrities have an additional right - Right of Publicity.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/publicity

> In the United States, the right of publicity is largely protected by state common or statutory law. Only about half the states have distinctly recognized a right of publicity. Of these, many do not recognize a right by that name but protect it as part of the Right of Privacy. The Restatement Second of Torts recognizes four types of invasions of privacy: intrusion, appropriation of name or likeness, unreasonable publicity, and false light.

https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity/

> In the United States, no federal statute or case law recognizes the right of publicity, although federal unfair competition law recognizes a related statutory right to protection against false endorsement, association, or affiliation. A majority of states do, however, recognize the right of publicity by statute and/or case law. States diverge on whether the right survives posthumously and, if so, for how long, and also on whether the right of publicity is inheritable or assignable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights (and in particular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#Japan )

> In October 2007, J-pop duo Pink Lady sued Kobunsha for ¥3.7 million after the publisher's magazine Josei Jishin used photos of the duo on an article on dieting through dancing without their permission. The case was rejected by the Tokyo District Court. In February 2012, the Supreme Court rejected the duo's appeal based on the right of publicity.

> I've been amused by the WH40k videos narrated by David Attenborough.

Have you seen the Thomas the Tank Engine videos narrated by Ringo Starr and George Carlin?

…

Heh Heh Heh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a_gW1KvuFk

… Now, that’s the one where they remix his narration on the show with his standup routines. It’s still mind blowing that they actually gave him the part to begin with. Same for Ringo.

The Warhammer 40k stuff with David Attenborough seems pretty interesting too.

eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_XAhAfcTWs

The creative / interesting part with the WH40k content is that you can't just take a chunk of text from some book and drop it into the voice synthesizer.

In order to get the Attenborough feel, it is necessary to use the proper vocabulary and word order along with punctation hints for pausing and phrases.

Without that work you get something closer to the Joe Rogan fake podcast where things just feel "off".

IIUC/IANAL: depends on whether anyone feels the data to be "it" or not. Provenance is not too relevant.

Take it to court and find out!

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