Heart on My Sleeve
In plain wordsA 2023 song that used AI to imitate the voices of Drake and The Weeknd without their involvement; it went viral before being pulled, becoming a landmark case for AI voice cloning in music.
A song released in April 2023 by an anonymous producer using the name Ghostwriter977, sung by AI-cloned imitations (see voice cloningvoice cloning, n.: Using AI to copy a specific person's voice from recordings, so a computer can say new things that sound like them — useful for dubbing and accessibility, and abused in scams.) of the voices of Drake and The Weeknd, neither of whom took part. It drew millions of views on TikTok and hundreds of thousands of streams before the artists' label, Universal Music Group, had it removed from streaming platforms. The episode became the reference case for synthetic celebrity voices in music: it exposed gaps in copyright, which protects recordings and compositions but not a voice as such, strengthened industry demands for consent and licensing in AI training, and was cited in debates over likeness legislation such as Tennessee's ELVIS Act (2024) and US federal proposals against unauthorized digital replicas.
Since Heart on My Sleeve, every label contract has a clause about AI voice models.
Origin
Uploaded to streaming services on 4 April 2023 and spread through TikTok in mid-April; Universal Music Group issued takedown notices on 17 April 2023. Ghostwriter977, whose identity remains unknown, released another AI-voiced track in September 2023.
Related
- voice cloningvoice cloning, n.: Using AI to copy a specific person's voice from recordings, so a computer can say new things that sound like them — useful for dubbing and accessibility, and abused in scams.
- deepfakedeepfake, n.: A fake but realistic video, photo or voice recording made with AI that puts words in a real person's mouth or shows them in a scene that never happened.
- synthetic mediasynthetic media, n.: Images, video, audio or text created or substantially altered by AI rather than recorded or written directly by people, whether for art, entertainment, business or deception.
- AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art.
- Will Smith eating spaghettiWill Smith eating spaghetti, n.: A grotesque 2023 AI-generated video of actor Will Smith eating spaghetti that became a meme and an informal yardstick: each new video model is judged by how well it redoes the scene.
- Balenciaga PopeBalenciaga Pope, prop. n.: A 2023 AI-generated photo of Pope Francis in a stylish white puffer coat that fooled many viewers, becoming a landmark example of how convincing fake images had become.