The Ballad of ‘Deepfake Drake’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This month, an anonymous producer jolted the music industry by using artificial intelligence to impersonate the singers Drake and the Weeknd, creating a fake track, “Heart on My Sleeve,” that quickly went viral. Joe Coscarelli, a culture reporter for The Times, talks about how the song’s rise and fall could presage widespread changes in the way music is made. Guest: Joe Coscarelli, a culture correspondent for The New York Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi and this is The Daily.
0:07.0	When an anonymous music producer used artificial intelligence to impersonate Drake earlier this month,
0:19.0	it jolted the music industry.
0:22.0	Today, my colleague Joe Coscarelli on the rise and fall of one AI song and what it means for the future of music.
0:42.0	It's Friday, April 28th.
0:46.0	Joe, welcome to the show.
0:53.0	Hey, thanks for having me.
0:55.0	So, you are a music reporter.
0:57.0	That's the world you cover.
0:59.0	But this is an episode about artificial intelligence.
1:03.0	An artificial intelligence AI is something we've covered a lot on the show.
1:07.0	But never when it comes to music.
1:12.0	Tell me how these two things came together for you in your recent reporting.
1:17.0	There's obviously been a lot of buzz about AI in recent months, all across all my social media,
1:24.0	television, cover of our newspaper, chatbots and image generators.
1:29.0	I'm thinking of chat GPT.
1:31.0	Everyone's saying they're the next big thing.
1:33.0	What do they mean for various industries?
1:36.0	In my world, the people who make popular music, fans of popular music and the people who build businesses around pop music.
1:44.0	AI hadn't really been a thing.
1:47.0	There had been some experiments with AI on the fringes of the music business over the years,
1:51.0	but they've always seemed a little bit academic or niche.
	...

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