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

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by Shannon Thaler

YouTube has announced a new artificial intelligence tool that creates tracks sung by famous artists such as John Legend and Demi Lovato, though some critics have slammed it as cutting-edge technology that has robbed music of its “human spark.”

Starting Thursday, US creators can access an AI tool called “Dream Track” in the short section of the video sharing site, YouTube Shorts, where they are encouraged to write a prompt that produces an original 30-second audio clip. Featuring AI-generated audio from a selected artist, Advertise YouTube.

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

in Demo video In the voice of Charlie Puth, the user writes this prompt into the Dream Track: “A song about how opposites attract, upbeat acoustic.”

Then Booth’s voice sings: “Baby, we don’t have anything in common, but I know I’m what you’ve wanted for a long time now.”

The commenters on the video didn’t seem happy with the Dream Track’s development.

“YouTube is replacing creators now. Beautiful. Disgusting stuff,” one person wrote, while another commented: “Soon most of that human spark is completely gone and all you have is noise.”

“There is a lot of beautiful music out there if you look for it. The problem is that it is completely devalued by technology. Creators make art because they have to. It’s who they are. The world we are building here is making it difficult for these people to survive,” another wrote. life”.

On others Technology demo videos It was posted on the site’s own YouTube account and received similar comments, with one user quipping: “Wooo let’s put musicians out of business.”

“Washing is a joy!” Another scoffed.

Another commenter pointed out that YouTube disabled viewers from seeing the amount of “dislikes” a video had received, and only showed the number of “likes,” which was approximately 400 at the time of writing.

Dream Track was created in partnership with Google’s AI lab, DeepMind, which debuted Lyria, “our most advanced AI music generation model to date,” as well as a suite of music AI tools to power the new AI bot. Google said in its own press release.

When The Post reached out to Google, YouTube’s parent company, for comment, a spokesperson pointed to its press releases about Dream Tracks.

As some artists contribute their voices to the AI ​​technology, others in the music industry have filed lawsuits to ensure their work isn’t stolen by bots.

YouTube addressed the potential concerns in its announcement. “While countless companies are defining their own AI approach, we want our approach to be defined by partnership and accountability,” the company said, pointing to its newly developed set of AI music principles.

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

Meanwhile, Universal Music recently joined music publishers ABKCO and Concord in lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in Tennessee federal court last month, accusing it of misusing an “uncountable” amount of copyrighted song lyrics to train its chatbot Claude.

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

The authors — including comedian Sarah Silverman, who is also the copyright holder — have filed a similar lawsuit against Meta and OpenAI, which are behind LLaMA and ChatGPT, respectively.

Silverman filed separate lawsuits against both tech giants in July, alleging that their AI models used content from her memoirs. the bidwater, For training without her permission.

Complaints also included authors Christopher Golden and his award-winning novel AraratAnd also Richard Qadri, who wrote Sandman Slim.