We’ve been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence lately. Some of the artistic creations are pretty impressive.

AI generated photos of the Pope playing basketball are now going viral online 🤣🏀 pic.twitter.com/yNh8Uc1T46

— Daily Loud (@DailyLoud) April 18, 2023

AI can do a lot more than chat these days. It can paint great album covers. Seriously, this would totally work for a BOC album.

The future of New York imagined by A.I 🤯🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/WhZ7HCyThy

— Acknowledge A.I (@acknowledgeai) February 17, 2023

So it probably wasn’t going to be long before it could make the music to go on the album too. Not just make it but make an actual hit song. And that’s what a TikTok user named Ghostwriter did over the weekend. He created an AI generated collaboration between rapper Drake and the Weeknd and it took off all over social media, getting millions of listens. The song was called “Heart On My Sleeve” and it appeared to be heading for the charts before Universal Music Group, the company that produces both artists, had it pulled down everywhere.

As Monday began, “Heart on My Sleeve” was racking up enough listens and views that it appeared to be on track to become a charting song when this week’s chart results are released next Monday. However, DSPs began deleting the track during the day, presumably under pressure from Universal Music Group. After initially disappearing from Tidal and Apple Music, it also became invisible in Spotify search results and was “greyed out” as unplayable on a bookmarked page…

The mystery account behind the AI song, identifying as Ghostwriter, left no clues about how the imitative track was brought into being, or what information was fed into programs to create it. But in two minutes and 16 seconds, “Heart on My Sleeve” consists of two distinct verses and a chorus sung by voices distinctly resembling the two stars, with lyrics referring to Selena Gomez, who was reported to have been dating the Weeknd in the mid-2010s. Sample lyrics: “I came in with my ex like Selena to flex, aye / Bumpin’ Justin Bieber the fever ain’t left, aye”… And, “Talkin’ to a diva yeah she on my nerves / She think that I need her, kick her to the curb ‘ All I know is you could’ve had the world … yeah, you were my world.”

It’s an odd situation because the song itself wasn’t created by either artist and definitely doesn’t belong to Universal Music Group. Essentially, UMG got this pulled down because the track sounds like their artists even though it’s not. It’ll be interesting to see if that holds up in court. UMG released a statement about the song which sounds a bit desperate to my ears.

…in a statement this week, the company spoke to the broader stakes, asking “which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation.”

Artists and their labels are confident, at least for the time being, that the social and emotional component of fandom will separate the work of the real Drake from a fake one, even if an A.I. version can nod at his emotional preoccupations and musical tics.

But whether superstars could have their pockets picked, or become altogether obsolete in favor of machines that can imitate them, is only one side of the equation. Royalty-free music generators can be used now to compose a rap beat, a commercial jingle or a film score, cutting into an already fragile economy for working musicians.

Back in the 80s the drum machine first made its way into popular music. There are actually quite a few hits by big stars which started with them fooling around with drum machines. Boys of Summer written by Mike Campbell and Don Henley is one. There are a lot ore examples. In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins, I Can’t Go for That by Hall & Oates, When Doves Cry by Prince.

Maybe if there had been a drummers’ union of some kind they could have gone on strike to protest the introduction of the drum machines that were replacing human drummers on some of these hits. But for the most part, people just saw it as another creative tool to be used by creative people. And at the same time there was still plenty of room for the human drummers like the late, great Neil Peart.

Then with the advent of rap we had no bands at all, just a DJ who spun beats and samples of other songs. The band had been replaced and yet there was still plenty of creativity and artistry in the lyrics. It was a change but it was really the start of the style that guys like Drake are known for today.

Now, at last, we have a machine can potentially replace not just the drums and all the instruments but the singers too. It can even write the lyrics. That’s a big advance over those early drum machines in the 80s but it feels like part of the same process. No doubt some machine-created tracks will be able to out-compete the human-made ones, if not now then soon. I suspect that’s partly because a lot of the human made tracks these days aren’t that good. But for the most part it’s just another tool that, hopefully, will be used by creative people to jumpstart their own creative process.

In this particular case, I think the smartest thing Drake, the Weeknd and UMG could do is make a deal with Ghostwriter and record their own version of the song with their own tweaks to the music and lyrics to make it better. Then just collect all the money that rolls in. We don’t have to be afraid of this stuff so long as we’re still in control of it. Anyway, here’s “Heart On My Sleeve.”