A shockingly passable Drake and the Weeknd fake raises all sorts of questions about the future of craftsmanship and listener demand
It’s been a decade since Drake and The Weeknd appeared on a record together: Drake was featured on “Live For,” a single from The Weeknd’s maligned debut album, Kiss Land. Toronto hip-hop and R&B superstars, Drake and The Weeknd were once close collaborators, but their careers diverged when The Weeknd signed to Republic Records and shattered the shared fan base’s dream of OVOXO. So it was a surprise to hear a fateful new song this month, “Heart on My Sleeve,” featuring Drake and the Weeknd, produced by Metro Boomin – but not really, as the song was composed by artificial intelligence.
The song’s true producer, a mysterious figure currently known only as a ghostwriter, first shared “Heart on My Sleeve” on TikTok. He has so far withheld any explanation as to how exactly he made the song, so it’s unclear whether the voice acting on “Heart on My Sleeve” was entirely AI-generated or simply modified to reflect the “real” artist like Drake and the Weeknd to make sound. (You can hear examples of both approaches in others clear cases.)
It’s worth assessing the quality of Heart on My Sleeve before we delve into the supposedly cyber-dystopian implications of this sort of thing. The song is a frighteningly passable fake, composed with careful consideration of the artists’ personalities and inclinations. Drake and The Weeknd both star in a recent romantic drama starring Justin Bieber, Hailey Bieber and Selena Gomez. The verses retain some characteristic quirks: Drake ends each of his bars with a throaty discharge (“ay,” “yeah”), and the Weeknd at first mimics Drake’s flow, but then loosens up a bit later in its verse (though my colleague Alyssa Bereznak notes an uncharacteristic embarrassment in his high notes). The beat, however, is much less convincing: Metro Boomin wouldn’t normally use a piano melody in such a clunky and repetitive style.
Overall, I rate “Heart on My Sleeve” as a passable imitation. As a song I rate it a bit lower though. There’s now a cottage industry of content creators producing their own AI impersonations of popular artists – Drake, Kanye West, Travis Scott – although none of the others I’ve encountered are as technically impressive or technologically menacing as Heart on My Sleeve .”
The recent surge in sophistication of artificial intelligence applications excites some people and terrifies others. Tech critics and AI skeptics have spent the past few months — effectively since OpenAI ChatGPT launched in November — pondering the potential impact on humanity. Some of these critics pose the big civilizational questions of post-apocalyptic science fiction. What if HAL 9000? What if Skynet? Others worry more about the economic impact. What if the latest advances in artificial intelligence accelerate job losses to automation? As a critic, I naturally tend to concern myself with the cultural dimension. What if artificial intelligence puts working-class writers and artists out of work, and what if this is not only a labor problem but also a cultural one? What if we gradually lost the ability to distinguish between images, sounds, and ideas produced by humans and similar content produced by software? What if “Heart on My Sleeve” or something topped the Hot 100? This feels like a point of no return.
Universal Music Group, which has record deals with Drake, the Weeknd and Metro Boomin, has spent the last few days removing “Heart on My Sleeve” from every corner of the internet. (That’s why the song isn’t linked here.) The company released a remarkably charged statement in which it implored “everyone involved in the music ecosystem” to show their allegiance to either “on the side of the artists, fans, and human creative expression” on the side of deepfakes, fraud and denial of artists due compensation.” But you should read the statement in its entirety. It begins with UMG acknowledging the role of cutting-edge technology in empowering musicians and acknowledging their own efforts to develop music-related AI. So much for the sacredness of “human creative expression”!
The music industry has been recruiting specialists and developing this type of technology for some time. Those efforts culminated last August when Capitol Records notoriously signed its first AI rapper, FN Meka, but then dropped him amid backlash over the alleged racial insensitivity of his lyrics and stylization. This backlash highlighted the big blind spots for AI: cultural context for genres and biographical context for artists and songs. VTubers like Meka can do a lot — they can take on different personalities and build fan bases from the ground up, but they can’t reliably handle hip-hop’s complex racial dynamics (yet), and they certainly can’t (yet) date Selena Gomez. AI is essentially a black box of statistics and linguistics. It can obviously improve its simulation of some of these things, but its output will likely remain a distinct subset of arts and culture. A genre of its own, if you will.
It’s a little too late to reverse the incorporation of computers into modern music at the expense of more traditional instruments, and the anxious impulse to draw a clear line on the incorporation of artificial intelligence is a little too arbitrary. The distinction between artistry and technology isn’t as strong as is implied in the hotter parts of this press release from UMG. It’s more of a spectrum – although admittedly one that seems to be pushing its futuristic extreme. Some of the concern in this regard is not so much about the future of music as it is about the present or past decades. Someone who hates Drake, or hates trap, or hates hip-hop, or hates pop—someone who dislikes the computerization of modern music in general—is likely to hear “Heart on My Sleeve” as a justification for so many grouchy complaints of audio overproduction. If labels, artists and fans were intent on lowering the premium for natural talent, what did we expect? If a producer armed with young software can more or less reconstruct the voices of two of the world’s most popular artists, then how good are they really, and who says they aren’t rivaled, if not completely replaced, by AI should be? ? Maybe we’ll get the culture we deserve.
But it’s still a bit too early to be completely pessimistic. Music and technology have a strained relationship in some areas and a beautiful interaction in others. Perhaps ghostwriting has just ushered in the annihilation of music as an art and profession, a sure sign of darker days for humanity in the age of AI. Or perhaps Ghostwriter, apparently a young musician himself, is using new tools to pioneer a new genre – a story as old as music itself.