Google and Universal Music in talks for deal regarding AI deepfakes

While the music industry is as much a business as a coalition of creators and artists, the industry has often struggled to keep up and evolve with changing technology and listener trends. The recent rise in artificial technology has pushed the industry into a corner it hasn’t faced since the early days of Napster and file sharing at the turn of the century.

While the use of Artificial Intelligence or AI can create beautiful moments, such as David Guetta utilizing it to craft a unique live edit of the voice of Eminem, the industry also saw the dark side of the technology when a deep fake song was crafted to imitate Drake and The Weeknd, creating a brand new single that was uploaded to streaming platforms for a short time. For now, industry leaders are debating how to handle this new technology, looking at both copyright law as well as creating their own systems and technology to combat the rise of deep fake uploads.

Two of the biggest organizations on the planet, Google and Universal Music have now entered talks to try to develop a tool to help combat the rise of AI by determining a way to properly license artists’ voices and melodies to help ensure royalties are paid out to the proper parties.

“With the right framework in place” AI would be able to “enable fans to pay their heroes the ultimate compliment through a new level of user-driven content,” stated Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl

If the infrastructure can be developed, the plan is to give artists the option of opting into licensing out their talents for fan-generated projects. As of this writing, Google and Warner Music are still in early talks of development and there is no public timeline for a release of this new tool or system.

Image credit: Mitchell Luo (Unsplash)