French DJ and producer David Guetta recently treated a massive crowd of ravers to a surprise new song, featuring rapper Marshall “Eminem” Mathers.
Just one thing: Eminem, the living human, didn’t have anything to do with the track.
In a video posted to Twitter last week, Guetta excitingly explained that he used unspecified generative AI tools to craft a phony Eminem feature from scratch — lyrics, voice, and all.
“Let me introduce you to… Emin-AI-em,” Guetta captioned the video, which shows a clip of Guetta using the AI generation at a show, pieced together with a follow-up explainer, where the DJ of “Sexy Bitch” fame explains his Emin-AI-em process.
“Eminem bro, there’s something that I made as a joke and it works so good — I could not believe it!” says Guetta. “Basically you can write lyrics in the style of any artist you like, so I typed: ‘write a verse in the style of Eminem about future rave,’ and I went to another AI website that can recreate the voice. I put the text in that and I played the record and people went nuts.”
The crowd did seem to enjoy the song, judging by the clip. But Guetta seemingly didn’t specify to the audience that they were listening to something that was AI-generated — and jury’s still out on how Eminem feels about his “voice” being used at a major concert, seemingly without his approval.
To his credit, Guetta did follow up his video with a note to say that he “obviously” won’t release the song “commercially.”
But these are ethically murky waters nonetheless. Guetta benefits one way or another from using Eminem’s voice at shows, even if he doesn’t actually bottle and sell the song. And commerciality aside, the threat of impersonation, particularly of celebrities, is a growing — and clearly inevitable — concern regarding voice-generating AI programs like whichever one Guetta apparently used.
It’s one thing for a DJ to remix a lyric that someone wrote and rapped or sang themselves, and wholly another to fabricate a feature entirely. The AI could say something offensive in the voice of an impersonated artist, the impersonated artist might not like it. Heck, the impersonated artist might just not want to be impersonated at all.
Indeed, different performers will have different thoughts and feelings — and it’s though Eminem has openly embraced several newer and controversial technologies, particularly web3 products and the metaverse — but this is uncharted territory regardless.
And to that end, Guetta’s world-famous — it’s likely that the many, many amateur DJs that plague this sordid Earth will take Guetta’s use of the tech as a green light to use generative AI for similar stunts.
Anyway. As for how good the lyric actually was? In our humble opinion, it was… fine. Emin-AI-em really only “rapped” two lines, and they were quite simple.
“This is the future rave sound,” rapped Emin-AI-em. “I’m getting awesome and underground.”
Hell yeah. Get awesome, guy.
READ MORE: David Guetta Replicated Eminem’s Voice in a Song Using Artificial Intelligence [Variety]
More on voice generators: Startup Shocked When 4Chan Immediately Abuses Its Voice-Cloning AI