Bad Bunny has waded into the turbulent controversy surrounding the development of artificial intelligence (AI). The Puerto Rican singer exploded this Tuesday due to the online success of a reggaeton song in which his voice was artificially used. “If you like this shitty song going viral on TikTok, leave this group immediately. “You don’t deserve to be my friends,” the artist wrote in a message posted on his WhatsApp broadcast channel. The song has been circulating in recent days under the name NostalgIA (a title that plays on the initials of the technological tool), reaching more than half a million views on TikTok and almost a million views on Spotify.
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The creator of the theme is FlowGPT, a network user who plays with AI to create unusual collaborations. “[FlowGPT] “It was created to compose global hits based on all available data about the current artists,” explains the user in the third person in his own reports. He combines voices like those of Anuel AA with Feid, ex-partner and current partner of the Colombian singer Karol G; or Luis Miguels at featherweight. With a dozen songs in his repertoire, he has already exceeded 200,000 listens per month on Spotify.
In NostalgIA, the Bad Rabbit’s voice refers to the singer Bad Gyal. The Catalan artist even shared a video on TikTok with the song in the background and the lyrics: “I was really excited and then I discovered it was AI.” He deleted the video hours later. FlowGPT quickly responded to the words of the Puerto Rican, who was addressed by his first name, Benito. “Do you remember Benito from before? His hunger to be heard? A before and after of being in music? There are millions of Benitos around the world, frustrated but with incredible talent. Unfortunately, these Benitos will never have the same opportunities as you,” he explained in a video. In it, he emphasized the importance of Bad Bunny’s collaboration with established trapper Arcángel in Tú no Vive Así (2016), which served as a springboard for Conejo Malo to reach the top of the charts. “What would have happened to Bad Bunny without an archangel?” asks the user’s avatar.
AI fever in music
Artists’ artificial voices have been spreading on the Internet for months. In May of this year, Spotify deleted tens of thousands of these songs to prevent fraud. The streaming platform defended that this elimination did not occur due to its artificial origin, but rather due to a trap that it uses to collect royalties on behalf of fraudulent accounts. The panorama has not only sparked controversy. It has also been used by other artists. An example of this is the American of Puerto Rican origin Eladio Carrión. Ignacio Molina (bluegrave_, on social networks) created a parody of one of Carrión’s most famous songs, Si La Calle Llama, replacing phrases such as “my first pair of pesos” with “my first job” (my first job). The singer has even used this parody in his concerts, where he jokes with the audience: “You know it better than the original.”
Bad Bunny has tried to break away from his more reggaeton profile in his latest album, Nobody Knows What’s Going to Happen Tomorrow, released in October. The 22-song album is a return to his first steps as a trapper, a genre that he brought back to the top of the catalogs after the great reggaeton boom. In his criticism of NostalgIA, the Bad Rabbit recalled the end of the last release. “That’s exactly why I made the new album, to get rid of people like that. So, choo choo, out.”
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