Another fake AI artist has been outed and removed
There is absolutely no need for AI to be making “original” music. Can it be used as a tool? Absolutely. But no one is clamouring for music made by a computer program that learned everything by scraping the work and talent of flesh-and-blood artists. As Paul McCartney recently told someone, “Good luck in making another me.”
The latest issue involves HAVEN, an AI creation with a track called “I Run.” TikTokers have been calling this “the song of the year,” which is a pretty sad reflection on TikTokers.
If you’re unaware of what’s going on, “I Run” is a dance track that went viral very quickly after appearing out of thin air once it debuted online October 28. The track was streamed over 13 million times in short order before both Spotify and and Apple Music yanked it. The issue is not that it was an AI but that whoever created it, tweaked the vocals to sound like an existing human artist. So yeah, artist impersonation. A fake facsimile of a real person.
Here’s the mystery: Which artist was being impersonated? Spotify and Apple Music haven’t commented. We do know that a London-based man named Harrison Walker, who also says he performs the vocals. He used AI to tweak his performance to sound like someone else by running it throught Suno, the music-generating AI program. Sharp-eared people have identified British singer-songwriter Jorja Smith as the one being copied, She, however, claims that it’s not her
Since then, the credits for the song have been updated to include a singer named Kaitlin Aragon alongside Walker. This points to the possibility that the song will be re-released in this new form. (I refuse to link to it. Fakes won’t get any help from me.)
So is this AI or AI-assisted? There’s a distinction, but it can be pretty blurry. Meanwhile, the song has been disqualified for the Billboard Charts and the UK’s Official Charts, YouTube Music has dumped the song, too.
Use of AI in music is inevitable. It’s not going away. But learning to prompt Suno will never be the same as spending years learning to be a musician. Yes, it’s hard. It’s supposed to be. That’s what makes being a musician special, We can’t lose sight of that.
I’ll leave you with this from Kyle Mooney,
