Should we be worried about deepfake songs?

The latest collaboration between Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd, titled Heart on my sleeve, a paen to actress Selena Gomez, has gone viral, largely because neither Drake nor Abel Makkonen Tesfaye have anything to do with the recording. Instead, the track was recorded by somebody calling themselves @ghostwriter, who claims that the song has been created using generative algorithms trained with the voices of the two.

At the time of writing, the song was back on YouTube: the original uploaded by @ghostwriter was taken down yesterday after a copyright infringement claim by Universal Music Group, which owns the rights to the performers’ creations (and about a third of the rights to the global music market). We can now expect a long and fruitless online chase, because according to them, that’s what they have to do to ensure that their intellectual property rights are respected. The song is completely synthetic, both music and lyrics, and the sound quality is less than impressive: there are moments when the voices do not sound as they should and part of the lyrics are lost. Fans of the two singers are already…