YouTube’s new AI tool creates music with vocals from popular artists

Business

By Shannon Thaler

YouTube has announced a new AI tool that generates music tracks sung by popular artists like John Legend and Demi Lovato – although some critics have slammed it as the latest technology that stole music from the “human spark”. Is.

Starting Thursday, U.S. creators can access an AI tool called “Dream Track” in the video-sharing site’s short-form section, YouTube Shorts, where they are encouraged to type a prompt that creates an original, 30-second video. Will produce. YouTube announced the audio clip featuring the AI-generated voice of the selected artist.

Nine popular artists lent their voices to the dream tracks: John Legend, Demi Lovato, Charlie Puth, Sia, Alec Benjamin, Charli XCX, Papoose, T-Pain and Troye Sivan.

In a demo video featuring the voice of Charlie Puth, a user types this prompt into the dream track: “A song about how opposites attract, upbeat acoustic.”

Then, Puth’s voice sings: “Baby, we got nothing in common, but I know I’m the one you’ve been wanting for so long.”

Commentators on the video did not seem thrilled with the Dream Track development.

“Youtube is now replacing creators.. Awesome. Disgusting stuff,” one person wrote, while another said: “Soon most of that human spark will disappear completely and all you will be left with is noise.”

“There is so much beautiful music out there if you look for it. The problem is that it is being completely devalued by technology. Creative people make art because they have to. It’s just who they are. The world we are building here is making it harder and harder for those people to survive,” wrote another.

Other demo videos of the technology published on YouTube’s own account on the site were met with similar comments, where one user sarcastically wrote: “Woo let’s put musicians out of business.”

“Washouts rejoice!” Another quipped.

Yet another commenter pointed out that YouTube prevented viewers from seeing the amount of “dislikes” the video received, and only showed the number of “likes”, which at the time of writing was about 400.

Dream Tracks was created in partnership with Google’s AI lab, DeepMind, which introduced Lyria, “our most advanced AI music generation model to date”, as well as musical AI tools to power the new AI bot , Google said. It has its own press release.

When the Post contacted YouTube’s parent company Google for comment, a spokesperson pointed to its press release on Dream Tracks.

As some artists are lending their voices to AI technology, others in the music industry are filing lawsuits to ensure that their work is not stolen by a bot.

YouTube addressed the potential concerns in its announcement. “As countless companies outline their AI approaches, we want our partnerships to be defined by care and responsibility,” the company said, pointing to its newly-developed set of AI music principles.

The guidelines state that YouTube uses Content ID, a rights management technology that ensures copyright owners get paid for the use of their content, and employs talent from Universal Music Group’s roster to “generate content being developed on YouTube.” AI uses experiments and research to gather insights.” ,

Meanwhile, Universal Music recently teamed up with music publishers ABKCO and Concord in a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic in Tennessee federal court last month over “innumerable” amounts of copyrighted song lyrics to train its chatbot cloud on it. Was accused of misuse.

The major publishers claimed in their filing that Anthropic had infringed their rights by using copyrighted lyrics from at least 500 songs, ranging from the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” and the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”. Including Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars. “Uptown Funk” and Beyoncé’s “Halo.”

The authors – including stand-up comic Sarah Silverman, who is also a copyright owner – have filed similar lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI, the companies behind LLAMA and ChatGPT, respectively.

Silverman filed separate lawsuits against each of the tech giants in July, claiming that their AI models used content from her memoir, the bedwetter, For training without his permission.

Complaints also included author Christopher Golden and his award-winning novel AraratAlso Richard Cordray, who wrote sandman slim,