Thanks to the magic of artificial intelligence (AI), an emerging comedian has managed to transpose the voice of Michael Jackson on the Quebec success You’ll never know BBs. A completely improbable, but surprisingly realistic interpretation, which once again raises all kinds of ethical questions around the use of AI in music.
Mathieu Portelance, one of the members of the humorous collective Les Piles-Poils, wanted above all to make his subscribers laugh on social networks by having this classic Quebec karaoke sing by the late king of pop, the idea is so absurd. But in the end, the result is much more realistic than he had expected. At times, on the recording, as eccentric as it may seem, one could almost believe that Michael Jackson actually sang, in French, You’ll never know.
“It’s quite disturbing. If you hear it and you don’t know it’s artificial intelligence, you notice that there’s something about it that sounds weird, but it still sounds good. And it must be said that things have evolved rapidly. In the fall, if we had Michael Jackson sing, it wouldn’t have sounded very good, it would just have looked ridiculous. Next September, what will it look like? It will probably ring truer than it does today,” underlines Mathieu Portelance.
Even if Portelance describes himself as a geek, you don’t need to be a tech whiz to make such a montage. The comedian only had to create an account on the free site Uberduck.AI, where he downloaded the version of You’ll never know sung by Véronic DiCaire on the BB tribute album. He then had the choice between several voices, mainly big international stars.
With some singers whose tone of voice is lower, the subterfuge seemed less plausible, as the BB song is not in their register. But with the high-pitched voice of Michael Jackson, what was initially supposed to be just a joke turned out to be relatively realistic.
“It’s really not hard to do. You can make some adjustments to improve the reverberation or to give an effect live, but the AI does three-quarters of the work. It takes five minutes,” says Mathieu Portelance, who believes that the use of AI in music should be much better regulated.
Ethical issues
With UberDuck.AI, he was also able to make Michael Jackson sing on the famous jingles from the Barbies Resto Bar Grill chain in a humorous video. As with the BB song, Mathieu Portelance took great care to indicate that it was a parody. But the comedian fears that people much less well-meaning than him will hijack artificial intelligence to deceive the public.
Last month, an anonymous Internet user managed to create a duet between the two Canadian megastars Drake and The Weeknd from scratch. The song generated nine million views on TikTok, and even managed to slip onto online listening platforms, before being taken down. Many believed in the authenticity of the song, for which the two artists had not given their consent.
The feats of AI pose several copyright challenges. Universal Music recently asked listening platforms to protect its catalog to prevent it from being used on artificial intelligence software.
“There is a legal problem with copyright, but there is also a philosophical problem with AI. […] What makes music beautiful is not that it is technically perfect. Sometimes, what touches us in a voice, in music, are precisely the imperfections. Why do we want to lose this? Why do we want to choose the easy path by creating with software? It is precisely by going off the beaten track that we can innovate,” says DJ Poirier.
The Montreal artist regularly uses samples of other songs to create his own pieces. A process that has nothing to do, however, with artificial intelligence: “The sampling, it remains the point of view of a human artist on the work of another human. There is a recontextualization, a position taking. »
The next revolution
Others, on the contrary, see artificial intelligence as the future of music. French DJ David Guetta, who artificially recreated the voice of rapper Eminem on stage, even went so far as to compare AI to what the electric guitar was for rock or the sampler for hip-hop.
SOCAN, the country’s largest music copyright management society, recognizes that artificial intelligence can also foster creation. It is still necessary that the rights holders consent to it.
“There are already quite strict protections in the Copyright Act. Works are protected from their creation and, for their use, permission must be sought from the rights holders. And in general there is a financial reward for that. […] What we want is for no new exceptions to be added to the Act to take artificial intelligence into account. We want a neutral law in the face of new technologies,” says Alexandre Alonso, executive director of Quebec affairs at SOCAN.