This story was originally published on Passionfruit.
AI has taken over almost every aspect of public discourse. Will it leave professional writers without a job? Should the use of AI be outright banned in schools? Will graphic novels assisted by AI-generated art be able to receive copyright certificates? Will artists be sued for using text-to-image generation software that is trained off other artists’ work?
This month, musicians are further stirring the AI ethics pot. A viral, AI-lightning rod song, “Heart On My Sleeve,” which used the AI-generated likeness of artists Drake and the Weeknd, was released in April by an anonymous TikTok user known as Ghostwriter (@Ghostwriter977).
While other AI-generated songs scraping artists’ voices and lyrics have been released previously, few have received this level of viral attention. Staggeringly, the song received over 15 million views on TikTok since Ghostwriter released his first video about the song on April 15, and 600,000 streams on Spotify since it was uploaded on April 4.
