Switched on Pop - A.I. Drake has put music in a tailspin

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

We have an emergency podcast drop because the biggest and fastest moving story on the internet right now is about a song called “Heart On My Sleeve.” The track sounds like it was made by the producer Metro Boomin featuring Drake and The Weeknd. It might be one of the most consequential songs in music history because it was actually a fake, made with artificial intelligence. The blowback from this song has been enormous and a bit confusing. So host Charlie Harding went on The Vergecast podcast to break down how this song was likely made, and what it might mean for the music industry, the tech industry and all of our intellectual property.  Listen to the whole episode on The Vergecast Read Alex Cranz's story on Laser Bongs on The Verge Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Switch Don Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding, and I've got an emergency podcast drop for you because the biggest and fastest moving story on the internet right now is about a song called Heart on My Sleeve, a track that sounds like it was made by producer Metro Boomin featuring Drake in the weekend. And it might be honestly one of the most consequential songs in music history because it was actually a fake made with artificial intelligence. And the blowback from the song has been enormous and a bit confusing. So yesterday I went on the Vergecast podcast to break down how this song was likely made and what it might mean for the music industry, the tech industry, and all of our intellectual property. So here's the Vergecast hosted by Nilai Patel, Alex Kranz, and David Pierce of The Verge. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Drake, but not really Drake, or maybe it's Drake, or maybe it's just a crypto scam. That's the Vergecast. I'm your friend, Neelai.

Alex Kranz is here. Like, it has to be Drake. If it sounds like Drake, it's Drake, right? What a can of worms Alex is open. It's like a 1950s game show. We've heard a great time. David Pierce is here. Hi.

I'm the other other Drake. That's what a lot of my friends call me. Yeah. Whenever I look at you, David, I think, boy, what an excellent substitute for Drake. Really loved you in DeGrosi. Our friend Charlie Harding from Switch on Pop is here. Hey, Charlie. Hello.

I am going to clone my voice as Drake today. Yeah. Yes. I'm very excited. All I want to talk about is AI Drake is poor Alex and David know. I have not shut up about AI Drake all week. Yeah. Like immediately.

I think Monday, you're just like, it's Drake. We're just the whole VergeCast. We have comments on my story about Google and Copyerall. And one of the comments is, boy, this is going to be a long verge cast. You're right. So we got to talk about AI Drake and what's going on. There's just layers upon layers. Charlie is here to help us make some things.

Drake tunes. Yes. Very good. And talk about how the technology works, which I think will be really interesting. There's other stuff going on. It's the Blue Czech Apocalypse on Twitter. Snapchat is doing chatbots. David wants to talk about DVDs for some reason.

Good reasons. I support David. I support you, David. I'm surprised do you support... Listen, I have like five months left to rent DVDs. I have so many DVDs to rent. I'm just surprised that it's DVDs and not Blu-rays. I figured Alex would be like, kill the DVDs.

I mean, I'm kind of okay with that, but I think they're killing all discs, right? It's not just the DVDs. Yeah, I like to think of DVD as an umbrella term. It's like Kleenex. It's like a spiritual DVD. It means whatever you want it to mean. Yeah. Laser discs.

And there's a little bit of sad you to talk about today, which is BuzzFeed News is shutting down. And I don't want to dwell on it, but we've been talking a lot about the end of this era of the internet. And I think we should talk about that a little bit at the end as a preview for the entire episode about Activity that David has put on my calendar already. Can't wait. Okay, let's start with fake trick. I can't. It's like I'm too excited to start this conversation. Do you want to tell us all about how this happened, Neelai? Because you were on you were on this from the beginning, fake Drake. Yeah, I'm curious for Charlie's take. Charlie hosts an actual music podcast. So over the weekend, there's a track posted on TikTok by an artist named Ghostwriter 977, who is a person in white sheet and glasses.

The track is called Heart of My Sleeve, and the voices are Drake and the Weekend. And it's like a pretty good track. Is it pitched that way? Like, it's very obvious that way to see it. But I was trying to remember when this first came out was this like, this is a... It's hashtag Drake in the weekend. The title is not safe, but it also is hashtag AI. And importantly, this will be very important later.

At the beginning of it, there's a producer called Metro Bruman. He's now also an artist. He's got a famous producer tag by future. if Young Metro don't trust you, I'm going to shoot you. That's the tag. And that is at the beginning of the song. So the implication here is that Metro Booman has produced a track with Drake and the weekend. Two artists that have not appeared together for five-ish years.

This is a real thing. But it's obviously AI. Yeah. So it like blows up in an uncanny way over the weekend. Like the TikTok account is brand new. No one's ever heard of this person. It instantly has millions of streams. Charlie, like there are lots of AI tracks.

out there. This one just blew up in a weird way. Do people just love Drake that much? I think, frankly, it is a serviceable song. Yeah. So it passes the,

actually sounds like it was made by a human. And when we think about what part of it was made by AI, I think it's probably actually just one very small piece, which is the creation of their voices. Yeah.

Very likely the beat is made by a human. Very likely the lyrics, If made by chat GPT, feel edited by a human. You know how AIs, the large language models, have this problem of hallucinating the longer they go into something. They're not great at doing music composition yet because they don't get the right balance of repetition and novelty. It kind of just like, the beats get weird.

Yeah. They don't. Do they just get more chaotic as time goes on? Yeah. 60 seconds song is great, but six minutes is like a total disaster. Exactly. They don't need stop referencing themselves. It works great.

for like ambient music, which doesn't need to ever have any reference to an earlier part. It just keeps on blending and moving. And that's why there's a lot of background AI music and like content music that that music is fine. But this is a real beat. So it sounds like someone got a beat. I don't know if they made it or if they just ripped it off of YouTube. There's a lot of beats available. Yeah.

And they wrote some lyrics. And the implication throughout is they sang or performed the song. And then they ran it through an AI to have Drake, recreate that performance. That would be my assumption. There are some tools out there right now that are open source, easy to use, where you can pretty easily just grab a piece of text, run it through a thing, and it will spit out

a Drake-like voice. Now, the open source ones that I have access to, they kind of sound like you're talking through a bad Zoom phone call. It's a little artifact-y and weird. But there's something coming out in like the next literally couple of weeks that are in pre-release. I'm sure people have access to betas

that sound uncans. where you can even live redo your voice and sound akin to the president, Drake, kind of whoever you want, as long as there's some training data in there. So my hunch is that this person probably has some access to. One of the better tools that I don't have access to yet that makes the voice sound really good. Yeah. What surprised me is that it's not a new thing that has occurred. Like, there is a very charming version of AI Kanye West performing, Hey There, Delilah that I'm just obsessed with.

It's just like it's adorable. Yeah. And I think Kanye should take a note and be like, here's what I'm doing. But like there's a lot of this stuff. There's burgeoning artistic communities using these tools. It's just fishy that this one appeared and blew up. I think it has a lot to do with timing. Yeah.

I have a bunch of things, right? There's so many AIA stories happening right now. The whole world has woken up and paying attention to large language models and people are experimenting in chat GPT and all of the various tools. And so I think they're just grabbing this perfect moment of the zeitgeist to do something in music, which hasn't been done yet. Like we've been obsessed with Dolly 2 for a minute. That fad is probably fading. We've been really obsessed with writing college essays from ChatGPT.

There hasn't been a good, there's been some fun ones in the past, but it wasn't in the same news cycle that we've been in right now. So I think it's kind of just kind of writing this AI news cycle perfectly. And it's also at a moment when the music labels are expressing a lot of anxiety to the, distributors and trying to figure out what they're going to do about their future copyright, not just of issues of making sure that Drake owns Drake's voice, but also the issue that AI music writ large could just come in such large volumes in the future that even if you are making original music, it might not even get noticed because what we're already at hundreds of thousands of tracks per day being uploaded, imagine when we're getting to tens of millions.

This is what I'm saying about it. We're already in that environment in this brand new TikTok account that no one's ever heard of before posted this thing that is maybe 5% better than the other AI songs that have existed before. Yeah. And it blew. I'm just telling you that crypto scam vibes in my heart are off the charts. Right?

Like, there's just something, like a lot of crypto people who became AI, people started tweeting about it. There's a link to download the full track to a company called Lalo that wants your phone number. No, don't do that. That's crypto adjacent in some weird way. Do you see what I'm saying? It's Kanye. It's Connie.

So my first thought was like, this is Drake himself. This is a real Drake track. And they're doing some stunt with it. And he'll pull off the sheet and reveal himself to be Drake. Controlling. In character for Drake. And then the weekend part of it doesn't sound quite so realistic. No.

And then UMG freaked out, which we can get to. So maybe that's not real. And then it's like, maybe it's Kanye West who hates Drake. And this would be like actually very in character for Kanye. That seems weird too. There's just something fishy about. I talked to somebody well placed to know, and they were like, look, it's bizarre. And things that are this bizarre aren't accidents on the internet anymore.

Yeah. But no one quite knows what's going on. There's a marketing agency behind it. Something's going on. It's getting very conspiratorial. I don't know, man. There's definitely an Occam's Razor version of this that says, like, TikTok is incredibly well-placed to make things popular that would not otherwise have a platform on which to be popular.

If you can do a passably good impression of Drake, you're going to be very popular on the internet. It's just like a thing that is true. And this has that like, we talked a lot about the swaggy pope on the show. Like this has a lot of that same vibe where it's just good enough that you initially don't catch it and you like think it's an all right song. And then you catch it and you're like, oh my God, this is what like blows your mind in several stages, which is like a perfect recipe for something like this to blow up way beyond what it would ordinarily do. Right. I'm just saying all the earned media that it got is legit. Like, we're talking about it because it's impressive. It's worth talking about it. But the first wave of that media was this is blowing up on TikTok. And I think that that turn of it in particular is you can just pay TikTok money to promote this.

And there were also a bunch of people like tweeting and stuff who were like, oh, this is really blowing up. And it had like 25,000 views. And it's like, I don't know that this is blowing up yet. And so we'll come to the fishy part and the takedowns and all that stuff. Because I think that's the next. turn of the story and I'm obsessed with what Google will do. But I just want to stay focused on the tool itself here. So Charlie, you have made this stuff. I was talking to you about it earlier this week and you're like, I just made one of these in two minutes and you sent it to me. And it was like, you were taking the text of me talking out Ticketmaster and you made Drake Rappit. And I was like, I just come on the show and do that. So walk us through how you actually go about doing this. Okay. So literally just before coming and sitting down with you all, I was like, oh, I've got to make one of

is really fast. So here's how I went about it. The first thing I did is I went to, first you need a beat, right? You can make some AI beats. I don't think they're that great. I don't like them. So you can make a very easy beat

by using open or very affordable sample library. So I was like, okay, let's go find like a high hat loop. Okay. So I found some like little loops. Oh my God. You're doing like a full Charlie Puth impression. What if there was a light switch.

What? I'll never do that. I should say I am an amateur beatmaker. Yeah. And I am not a rapper. But I could grab some samples. So I grabbed some samples. I dropped them into Ableton, my music software.

And I did this. This was like two minutes. All right. Beat. Just existing samples that are out there. Okay. Drake type beat. Yeah.

Drake would for sure wrap on top of that. Okay. No, no, that beat is like slightly too interesting for modern Drake. If you play that in a Banana Republic, they'd be like, ah, this is too hardcore, and that's the current Drake threshold. Banana Republic. Like, he makes skaggy pants music right now. I'm actually clear. Okay, so then I have the issue, as I said, not rapper, but I need some lyrics.

And I figure what I could do is I could just go to Theverge.com. And the first thing that I saw, let's see, it's no longer on the front page right now. but what was on the front page was it's a laser bong yes beautiful I just I'm so happy I literally felt like here are the lyrics to our song

I'm so happy so here's what I think the laser bong is the gift that keeps getting it really does what a beautiful 420 so I record myself just just stating the first

couple lines of your article in the verge it's a laser bong it's a bong there are lasers I could not be clear about what it is It's got some flow. Weed and lasers just seem to go together. Like weed in blacklight, velour paintings, or weed and peanut butter. Good. That's good.

Together, seem to go together, peanut butter, a little slant rhyme. I was like, all right, those are our lyrics. So I record myself. I go and find this website, Uberduck. Uberduck.a.a.i. Not affiliated. No idea. They have trained a bunch of rapper AI data sets that are, as I said, they're like, they're okay. They're not amazing.

So I enter, I upload my voice saying that thing. Okay. And then I type in the text, it needs to match them. And I hit synthesize and outputs this with my beat. I'm so excited. This is the most exciting thing that's ever happened. Yes. It's a laser bomb.

There are lasers. Oh my God. What this is. It's a laser bomb. We are lasers. Just seem to go to the bigger. We need a black, black, black, they'll go paint and so weed and peanut butterbomb. Oh my gosh.

So that's, it's a laser bong by the verge. Yes. That's going out on Spotify tonight. Tonight. Who has a CD baby account? Andrew Marino, do you have a CD baby account? Yep, that's a thumbs up. It's going out tonight.

But really, this was like, it took me a few minutes to put this together. And like, if we didn't like the Drake, um, who else do we? like? Let's grab Eminem. Let's see what he gives us. Oh my God. So let's do Eminem freestyle as the model. I'll hit synthesize. It takes a minute because this is like a joke of cool. The real time is like an important piece here. And I get a nice picture of Eminem. I feel like this isn't enough lyrics to give Eminem. That's really what I'm worried about. He's going to be very fast. Yeah. This is free. They have a paid version. UberDuck.a. AI. Yeah. All right. This is getting shut down. Like Eminem's lawyers are listening to this right now. But you're listening.

to this, pull the car over and synthesize as much rap music as you can. Do it now. Because it's not going to last for very long. And David got in trouble for using a M&M AI voice at a live show. And so

I don't want Eminem coming for the Verge cast, but here he is singing laser ball or rapping. Those are my lyrics, Eminem. It's a laser ball. It's a lot of latehance. It did not be clear about but this is weed and lace it just thing to go together like we in black like Bella paintings.

Weed and peanut butter. We need mac princeton. Hold, that just starts hallucinating. What? Just. Beautiful, M&M. I think I understood four of those words. And that was just like, you know,

each one of these models is clearly being trained by a user. Like, clearly the company is not wanting to upload these data sets. So they don't know how this information is getting in there. And probably why they sound bad is that there's probably not enough training data for each of these artists. And if you want to separate the voice from the music to get the acapella, you have to do so with an AI

separation tool. Oh, wow. Which are pretty good, but they still are going to have some digital artifacting, so that's going to get into the training data. So these things are not perfect yet, but they're pretty good. Here's another version of Drake by another era. This is M&M all era. So people

are doing different training sets. Oh, interesting. You can try different M&Ms. Let's see what this one sounds like. It's a bomb. not be clear about what this is. We need a black light for little pain. We have to stop giving Eminem a seizure on the show. You know, I'm telling you, but doesn't it kind of feel like he's just with us over Zoom

and there's a bad connection? And you're like, wait, Eminem, what was that? Can you try that again? Yeah, it just sounds just a little off there. Yeah, all of that. He's having a stroke as we do this. Liam has requested Ice Vice. Can we make this say whatever we want?

We can make it say whatever we want, yes. All right. So I have an email from a list. listener here. Okay. It's beautiful. And for disclosure, I've already sent Charlie the text to this email so you can begin this process. I'm going to read you this email. It's from Joe Lemoth. I hope I'm pronouncing that show.

Okay, guys, I'm late to the party in the last two podcasts, but here goes, I can venture with you all on a lot of stuff. Even some of the super weird crap Dieter used to come up with. That said, however, Nil I could not be more wrong on the carplay stuff. Let's go. Perfect. I drive at 2021 F150. Wireless CarPlay

works flawlessly for me. Also, look at these picks, two apps running, or at kind of like the iPads version of it. But look, CarPlay on the left and on the right, I have my podcast running. In the second shot, I even went full. I'm Neely and I burn money on satellite radio elitist mode. And I'm listening to Sirius XM to show it. You do not need my phone screen and sits down out of the way and I forget it's there.

This implementation of CarPlay is the best I've seen. Can we make Drake wrap Joe's email? You want Drake? You don't want Jay-Z? I would like it to be Jay-Z. I think we won both. I think it was. Jay-C. I just feel like I want to hear another one.

Jay Z, this model is different. With this one, I don't quite know how to do it, but you can change its pitch and all kinds of things, but we're just going to do the basic Jay-Z. And it might take a second, because this is a longer passage. Charlie, I have a question for you while it goes. Is there a reason this is something that would be easier with rap than with other genres of music?

I feel like we've seen it more with hip-hop than other genres. Is there a reason for that? Well, certainly with rap, you don't have to... pitch is not a think of a consideration, right? So you don't have to worry about getting pitch. Rhythm is challenging. In fact, the reason why I recorded myself saying the lines originally was because I wanted them to be decently in time again, not a rapper.

But if you just do what we're doing here, it's going to put them in some kind of random order. It's not going to hit the beat where it needs to. But here's Jay-Z. Let's see how he does with Carplay. Oh, guys, I'm late to the party on the last two podcasts. When it goes, I can venture what you want on a lot of stuff. You're some of the super weird crap dad that is to come up with. However, Millie could not be moron on the Cup play stuff

I drive a 2020 one-fueling at this cup play works flawlessly for me I was alone Look at these pics, you watch running on least Can't like the good best rich in a bit Look cup players, they're on the left and on the right I have my podcast running And the second shout I have been full of nilly And that just burn money for sick I like radio

And let this mood and actually listen to seriousness to show it I do not need my phone screen It sits down out of the way and I forget it is there This implementation of cup players the best I have seen is always Let a show me on my call on podcast for any time I think me to the entry Take six Missus,

you pay your spoiler to the enemy and good to the party. I think it's doing jibbers. There were some decent flow in there. There was moments like,

did that da-da-da-da-da. Really getting the flow towards the end and then if I chop that up and let me put auto tune on that, you give me, like, there could be, there's a thing there too.

Who knew Jay-Z was so in carply? Jay-Z saying I have my podcast running needs to go into the Vergecast theme song. I can be right. Well, one, Jay-Z is also wrong about CarPlay, as is Joe. That's the other hour of the show. So let's talk about, you know, this is incredible. Let's just feed more text into AI rappers for the rest of the hour.

It's incredible that it's easy. It's incredible the service is free. It's incredible that you were able to synthesize it against your own voice and make something that is quite honestly great, and I think will be our legacy. But it's also the layers. of complication here are like out of control. Yeah.

So you will recall that I said, heart of my sleeve, the fake Drake song, had the Metro Boomin tag in it. I don't know if that's AI or not. I really doubt it. Right, it doesn't make any sense. Based off of your whole feeling that this is... What is Metro Boom?

Oh, Metro Boom is a producer. So in the world of hip-hop, it's very common that you put a audio tag at the beginning of your beat so that people can identify it as yours. That's a way of producers really building a name for themselves, when historically producers, you know, are not usually named artists.

So it's a way to, you know, all right, Metrovine, start recognizing that. So that tag, I think that someone just copied that tag. Sure. I mean, it makes it, it's easier. Very easy to isolate it, take it apart. You can do that with existing AI tools that separate tracks. That's a whole other technology. So maybe some AI was used in the process of separating it from its underlying track,

or maybe Metro Boomin has that tag somewhere on the internet that is isolated. Very easy to crop, boom, it's in your track. Yeah. Again, this song, the song is, good enough that it works as a song that could chart on the Hot 100, largely, I think, mostly from interest of the sort of the excitement of it all, it being AI. But no, this is, that does not sound like it's AI. I really think the main AI element here is likely to just be the voice transposition,

voice synthesis model. Again, maybe the lyrics were somehow generated with AI. We don't know. I think we're going to find out. Like someone's something is going to have. Kanye West is going to reveal them. Okay. But it's important that the Metro Boobo,

and tag, we think is a sample. It's like a real sample, a future actually saying that on a track and measure to use that over and again. Universal has this like strong statement, which is very long that I won't read here, but Universal music comes out and says, we have to work with our streaming service providers. We think generative AI like this infringes our copyrights and other agreements. And that honestly, if you were like Universal's marketing team or like legal team, you might release this track just to release that statement.

Right. Again, the layers of potential stunn here are very high. I love that idea. The statement notably didn't say, we don't know anything about this or where it came from or anything like that. It just says AI is bad. We love our artists. Yeah. Plausible deniability. Yeah. So we're down in the weeds now of this thing. So they start issuing takedowns. We don't know if they're the ones who took it off of Apple Music and Spotify and title and the rest.

I've heard that that wasn't them. that the streamers just did it. Right. Because you did a little reporting on this. Yeah. Every now and again, old man puts up his old fedora and starts reporting. A little press.

Yeah, I start calling around and seeing what's going. So the streamers pull it down. And what's difficult is on YouTube and TikTok, you can't just call up and say, take it down, right? Because they're user-generated content platforms. So you have to file a DMCA takedown.

This is all very complicated. Anybody who's ever watched any amount of YouTube has like run into a creator being like, I don't have the copyright. Like, the YouTube take down system is real. YouTube takes it down and they put up a copyright noticing Universal asks to take this down. So then I start taking around for real

because that's really weird to me because the song is a new song. Universal doesn't own the song. And the law around do the you own Drake's voice. Doesn't really exist. Universal definitely doesn't own Drake's voice. Oh yeah, right, right. Right? So it wouldn't be universal.

It would be Drake or the weekend. And then the law, as you're saying, the law doesn't exist. So it dug around, reported out, Google on the record said to us, we took it down because of a sample. And I have learned the sample is the Metro Boomin tag. So we escaped this like legal nightmare.

It's not even a story about AI. It's just, this is a really old story about getting copyright clearances for samples. Yep. And it's like the escape hatch, like saved by the bell of this tag. So now Universal can claim this song contains an unauthorized sample that we own.

And if we hear this song and that sample is in it, take it down. that's copyright infringement. We own this sample. If that sample wasn't there, this is a nightmare. I wish it wasn't there. It's a good nightmare. I put it in as like a giant pull quote in our story.

It's like, if you upload this song without the Metro Boomin tag, because I desperately want this to happen. So the thing that you're talking about, the training data. Someone's out there uploading a bunch of Jay Z songs or a bunch of M&M songs or whatever. It's an Uberduck. They don't own the rights to train AI on those songs. Of course, not either just like open AI or any company which is scraping the internet for everything and doing the exact same thing. Are those actual rights though?

Like is that's, I think, the big question right now, right? Is who owns the rights to train AI? Is that something that you have to own the rights to? Because everybody's kind of saying, no, it isn't. If it's available, I can do whatever I want with that. This is the big debate. Right. Right.

So right now, if you write a song, Let's call Laservon. Part two. Right. You as the owner of the copy, right? You wrote the song, you recorded it, or in this case, you had Drake recorded for you. Yes. That's your song. You have a bunch of exclusive rights that are listed in the law.

There's a bunch of stuff you're allowed to do. One of the things you're allowed to do is sell copies of the song. And that's most people will buy copies of a song for you. They get from you the right to, like, play the song. You don't get the right to play the song in public or perform it. that like there are organizations that run around suing bars and restaurants because they don't have the appropriate public performance licenses. And this is just like a big system that has existed for decades.

One right you definitely don't have is the right to make if you just buy a song. You go to the store and buy a laser bond on CD and you come back and play it. You don't have the right to remix it or make a sample of it because that's a derivative work, right? That's you as the artist hold on to that right. Right. I can't sell. I mean, I can make that. I just can't sell it.

No, you're really not even supposed to make it. Really? Yeah. I'm learning all sorts of new things today. I mean, it's just copy. You're making copies. And so copyright law very narrowly regulates the act of making copies. Okay.

And it says you cannot remix this. Is that in any meaningful way different from what's happening with like search engines right now? Like to Charlie's point, the open AI and everybody is just pulling everything it could find on the internet, making training data out of it. And now you're starting to see publishers and other companies start to. get mad, is this just exactly the same thing? It's exactly the same thing. So Getty is suing stability and News Corp is making a lot of noise about doing Google. News Corp loves talking shit about Google.

Every Hollywood studio is going to start doing this. The idea that there are things you are allowed to make copies for and things you are not allowed to make copies for is, there it is. That's copyright law. So here they're saying, hey, making copies of our work into your computer for the purpose of training in AI is those are unauthorized copies. No one knows if that is a valid thing to say out loud. This has never happened before in the history of the world.

And then they're saying once you've trained your AI on those unauthorized copies, the songs you are making are now unauthorized derivative works of our songs or unauthorized derivative works of Getty photos or whatever it is. Yes, Charlie's going to jail. I mean, probably because you all can sue me because I stole it. I stole your copyright. I sold the text from the verge. I will be suing, yes.

I mean, nothing, there's nothing that could be better for this show than Universal suing us for. Laser pawn. Laser pawn. So I welcome the lawyers. Parity really gets you out of anything. Parity is a great excuse. I welcome that lawyer.

I welcome that letter from your lawyers and we will post it so fast. So you just have this problem, right? Where, okay, this step of we're going to train AI. by copying all the data onto the computer, that might not be fair use. And fair use of Liam will kill me if I go into this. It's a four-factor test, whatever. It's like as political as anything, right?

It's like as random as any court decision in the country, case-by-case, fair use determination. So that, all the creative companies are like, wait, this is not fair use. This is unauthorized copying to make training data. And Microsoft and Google and stability and whoever else are all saying, nope, this is fair use. Alex Heath was at a conference with the CEO of Stability AI where he said,

I hired the lawyer who wrote the book on Fair Use. Oh, okay. And Sarah Chong had like, who? Like, this doesn't make any sense. Sundar Pichai. In search, there's a string of cases from the early 2000s about Google and search where they found fair use over and again. The most famous is called Perfect 10 versus Amazon and Google. Perfect 10 is a porn publisher.

And their images were showing up in Google Image Search and Amazon Image Church. And the court had to feel like, yeah, Google is going to win this. one. But you've just got this like ancient body of law that allows these things to happen that doesn't apply one to one to this. And now you're like, what are they going to do? What's Google going to do? Google has to run YouTube where if you take that Metro Boom and tag out, the decision on whether or not this song is fair use or not is wide open. There's no thing like the DMCA for names and likenesses, right? You can't issue a that's my likeness takedown to Google. There's no mechanism. There's no law for it. It's all state law. It's not.

federal law. And then Google also is doing a bunch of AI stuff. So like what what do you've you've got YouTube, which as David keeps writing about, turns more and more into the cable company every day. Yep. So it needs rights holders to be happy. It needs the NFL to be happy. It needs Drake to be happy. Whoever's going to play at the next halftime show should be happy with YouTube. It's worth mentioning that the entire content ID system exists more or less because of multi-billion dollar lawsuits that many of these content companies went after YouTube when they were a much smaller company. Yeah.

And so Google's highly aware of how vulnerable it could be to huge litigation. And so all that stuff, the content that happened because of Viacom and Google basically at that time and YouTube at the time were new. And they were like, this is the cost of doing business. There's a famous scene at the end of like the social network where Mark Zuckerberg's lawyers are like, this is the price of being a success, pay the money, settle the lawsuit and walk away. Like that is very much how Google and YouTube thought about those cases. now they're giants.

Yeah. Like they're the incumbents, they're the infrastructure, they're the cable company with the deal with the NFL, and Open AI is not. Stability AI is not. And it's worth noting

that content ID is not the law. It's just an agreement between some companies. Yep. The way that content is treated there is very different than it is in other platforms. Yeah.

Your choices basically are like you upload a song or a video and say this is my video and Google trusts you that you're not lying and you're like, take all the videos

that mash this video down or monetize them and send them money to me. If you don't own the song, you can't say that. So, like, Drake can't show up and say, all uses of my voice I own, even if they're made by a robot, monetize them or take them down. That system doesn't exist and there's also just like...

I hope it does exist. I hope this is how it exists. But only for Drake. But only for Drake. I find it really interesting that you're having to go at length to explain how unusual this is, but underneath all of it, it just doesn't pass the smell test.

Like, I think any human is going to be like, uh, that sounds like Drake. Can you do that with Drake? That doesn't seem right. Like initially it's just like, oh, yeah, you can't do that? Is the, can you do that? Oh, maybe we can.

It's where we're at. But the law is just not prepared for it because the law is all based on making copies of existing things. And we just have never had a robot that can take your voice away from you. Yeah. And then talk about car. Well, and that's the thing. And if you take,

if you sort of take that out, like what chart? really saying, and you say, okay, this doesn't have the smell test, let's not allow it. You've just kneecapped all of the generative AI stuff that Google has basically poured its future into. And like, you either say this is allowed and piss off the music industry, or you say everything we think is the future of our company and the internet is illegal. And I don't, it's a total losing game. And I like, it doesn't seem like there's a middle ground here either. It really doesn't. Everyone's going to fight.

No, I don't know what Google's going to do. I mean, there's one middle ground, and I got an email from a longtime Burchcast listener who said, I agree with you. I think Google's going to solve it with money. I mean, fair. Okay. Sure. And maybe that's what Universal is gesturing towards. But you're not going to stop UberDuck AI, by demanding money, right? And the models are just going to run on people's computers, and the training data is going to get copied. And trying to regulate the copy of Drake's catalog onto your laptop to train a program on your laptop is a ridiculous exercise. But that is like what copyright law can do.

It can be like, you made a copy here. And that one knows illegal. But I think we are going to see some precedent because we have seen this in film and TV where they go and they take somebody's like this and they slap it onto a model. Like all the Star Wars movies are like, you know what? Princess Leia is alive again and young. Yeah. And so and they sign contracts. Like there's there's a bunch of-

Will Smith, I think famously signed his like whatever. What was that horrible movie they made? I Am Legend? Was it I Am Legend? No, no, no. is the one where he's like the younger version of him. He fights young Will Smith. Yeah. It's real bad. But yeah, like a bunch of contracts have been written. A bunch of people have kind of agreed on this. So there's, there's stuff there. Like people have figured this out. And there are those smell tests. And I think it's just going to be up to the courts. One decade. This is my prediction. Yeah. We'll be one decade. We got to wrap this up. Alex Heath is waiting. Come talk to us about Snapchat and their chat bots. Charlie, I'm curious just on the broader picture. You know a lot of artists. You know a lot of songs.

songwriters, you know, a lot of musicians. Switched Trump Pop is great. You should go listen to it. Is there the flip side of excitement? Like, look at these tools are so fun. Yeah, that was really fun. I just made LaserBong. It was the best. There's so many things that are happening in AI and music from how to mix and master your music more quickly so you can get it up on Spotify faster to make more interesting beats. There's endless, I think, creative tools that people are doing with this. And there's also people who are creating open source AIs that they are giving explicit permission that you can use their voice. And that's totally awesome. People are going to do some very creative stuff with it.

I haven't seen a track break through like this sort of gag one yet, though. But you'll probably, there's been like, because it's a crypto. Totally. It's all a crypto scam. Don't invest in anything. The future of our nation's copyright law is going to happen because of a crypto scam. And that seems about right. There is something.

There's definitely excitement. people are already using AI tools in small and interesting ways. But in terms of writing whole tracks for us, I have been saying since people have asked me this question, is AI going to write whole songs for us? When it's happening, there's just way bigger issues to be worried about. I mean, obviously, I don't mean to diminish the music industry. It's a big industry.

But when we're writing really good songs, when we're replacing excellently done composition and all the human creativity and the tens of thousands of choices that go into writing a song, I mean, the AIs are doing much more important things Power, military, like I'm just, I'm a whole, when that happens,

I'm paying attention to something else. All right, well, hit us with some laser bong and we'll let you get out of here. One more time, right again with laser bomb. Run it back. It's a laser bomb. It's a bomb. They are my lasers.

I could not be clearer about what this is. It's a laser bomb. Just seem to go together Like we and black Black they'll do paint and so weed and peanut butter Okay, it's me again, Charlie, by myself This was just the first part of the Vergecast Much more in-depth conversation on recent AI developments

You can listen to the rest of their conversation on AI On the Vergecast podcast Which you can find in our show notes Or wherever you get podcasts The Vergecast is one of the best places To keep up on the intersection of tech and culture And if you dig into their archives You'll even find more episodes of me and Nate

on the show, talking about the future of music and all the ways that technology changes what we're listening to. Anyway, we'll be back to our regular programming on Tuesday, and until then, thanks for listening.