Jay Z tries to use copyright strikes to remove deepfaked audio of himself from YouTube
In a fascinating deep dive from XOXO festival co-founder Andy Baio over at his website Waxy, Baio looks into AI-powered Jay-Z impersonations on YouTube, specifically one creator using Jay-Z’s iconic voice and hip-hop flow to rhyme classics like William Shakespeare's “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy from Hamlet and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
( To Be or Not To Be - https://lbry.tv/@VocalSynthesis:2/jay-z-raps-the-to-be-or-not-to-be:8 )
In a strange turn of events, Roc Nation LLC, Jay-Z’s full-service entertainment agency, filed copyright strikes against the YouTube uploads of the above-mentioned deepfakes. The notices specifically cite AI, with Roc Nation writing, “this content unlawfully uses an AI to impersonate our client’s voice,” according to Baio’s conversations with the creator, who remains anonymous and goes by the online handle Voice Synthesis. The channel itself has nearly 40,000 subscribers, and many of its videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
All of Voice Synethesis’ videos are created by feeding Google’s open source Tacotron 2 text-to-speech model with Jay-Z songs and lyrics and having the synthetic voice read pre-written text. The situation raises fascinating questions about what exactly is being infringed upon here if the synthetic voice is simply producing original content using the likeness of a celebrity. For a deeper look into the copyright issues at play here, I highly suggest you read Baio’s analysis in full because he gets into the finer details of fair use and why Jay-Z’s claims may not hold up in court.
I don’t really understand why mimicking a celebrity’s voice using an AI model should be treated differently than someone naturally doing an (extremely accurate) impression of that celebrity’s voice,” Voice Synthesis argues.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/28/21240488/jay-z-deepfakes-roc-nation-youtube-removed-ai-copyright-impersonation