Grimes Offers to Split Royalties for AI ‘Collabs’

Canadian musician and long-time AI fan Claire Boucher, a.k.a Grimes, isn’t “rattled” by AI-generated music. 

On the heels of the recent deep-faked Drake and The Weeknd hit Heart on My Sleeve, the singer invited other AI fans to create AI-generated music using her voice and said she’d split royalties just as she would with any artist she collaborates with — anything goes too, as she’s curious about what could happen and is interested in being a “guinea pig.”

Grimes, who named her first child with Twitter owner Elon Musk the Elven spelling of AI, added that she thinks “it’s cool to be fused with a machine,” and that she likes “the idea of open-sourcing all art and killing copyright.”

It’s not surprising for the singer to be jumping into AI-generated waters so willingly, she’s been preparing for it for a while. Speaking at the Web Summit in 2020, Grimes said that “Every day I thank the overlords of Ableton for cleaning up my tracks, but I do worry though that AI will outpace us and make musicians obsolete. It’s inevitable.”

OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT may have opened a hyperspeed tunnel to the advancement of artificial intelligence. Since its arrival late last year, thousands of new AI tools and models have been built, dramatically democratizing AI. And as with every piece of life-changing technology, it didn’t take long for it to be used nefariously. 

Unlicensed AI-generated music using cloned voices of artists like Drake, The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, and Ye was the past week’s viral hit. Artists and labels alike are struggling to catch up. Grimes’ open invitation for AI collaboration might just be, as Magatte Wade put it when she applauded the singer on Twitter, “hacking a new way forward.”

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