Watch A World Famous DJ Use AI To Recreate Eminem’s Voice
DJ David Guetta used an AI text generator to create faux Eminem lyrics and imitate the rapper's voice.
Thanks to the wonders of machine learning and AI, all the stars we know and love will soon be immortal! Well, not the whole star, just the parts of them that other people can profit from. Case in point, DJ David Guetta used AI to recreate Eminem‘s voice, which he promptly used in one of his sets.
“This is the future rave sound, I’m getting lost in the underground,” the voice of the newly-christened Emin-AI-em announced to an absolutely thrilled crowd full of fans.
In the video he posted to Twitter, which has so far received upwards of 1.4 million views, he explained that he used an AI text-generator website to create lyrics about future rave in the style of Eminem. He then went to an AI voice recreation site and used it to say those Eminem-style lyrics using Eminem’s voice.
“And it worked so good. I could not believe it!” Guetta said.
Guetta says that he created the AI-powered voice as a joke, but was impressed by how well it worked. He said that he’s obviously not going to release the voice commercially. The world-famous DJ, whose net worth is $150 Million, apparently believes that using the voice in front of a massive sold-out crowd is somehow not a commercial endeavor.
The use of AI to recreate voices, faces, art styles, and more has been a huge trend over the past two years. Organizations like OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Stability AI have created tools that the public can use for coding, writing, image creation, and more.
However, there has been no shortage of controversy surrounding the use of these tools. Since the AI is modeled using millions and millions of works (many of which are copyrighted), there’s the question of whether the creation of those tools infringed upon the copyrights of millions of original artists and writers. There are also situations in which AI-produced articles have been found to outright plagiarize other online articles.
There’s also the question of whether an AI-created work can even be copyrighted by its creator, since the creator in question is arguably the computer, not the human who told the computer to create the work. U.S. law has previously held that only works created by a human can be copyrighted, and courts have previously ruled that computer-generated work did not qualify for copyright protection. As recently as 2022, the US Copyright Office Review Board ruled that a computer-generated image of a landscape submitted by AI pioneer Steven Thaler was not copyrightable.
Assuming that these rulings hold up as AI technology advances, this essentially means that every creation is automatically public domain. If the AI Eminem voice that David Guetta used isn’t copyrightable, then you can also use it (assuming Eminem doesn’t successfully sue him for its use). On top of that, those AI art pieces that have won art contests are creations that you can print on a postcard and sell online — by current legal interpretations, the presumed “artist” is not the owner in any meaningful legal sense.
There will be no shortage of controversies and legal shenanigans surrounding AI in the near future, so it’s not currently advisable to just yoink an AI artist’s work and use it as your own. The brave new AI-centric world will lead to unexpected directions — and we’re just along for the ride.
