This AI-Generated Kendrick Lamar Song Sounds Like The Real Thing (And It’s Terrifying)

JAY-Z’s long-time producer and audio engineer Young Guru has taken to social media to highlight the complicated issues surrounding generative AI. What’s spurred the post is a fascinating video of a man using an outrageously accurate Kendrick Lamar voice filter, warping his voice to sound exactly like the rapper so he can create a fake K. Dot song from scratch.

Sharing the video to his Instagram over the weekend, Guru has called for authorities to move quickly to implement laws that would protect artists from the litany of copyright issues that’d arise from such uses of AI. Currently, the very convoluted world of intellectual property law includes nothing that actually allows anyway to copyright their own voice. There’s no way to trademark a voice, and there’s no way for anyone to file a patent on their own voice.

Digging around the internet, there seems to be plenty of concern right now as to how generative AI will take advantage of this in the future. There are also many calls for authorities to completely overhaul copyright laws to prepare for the influx of deepfakes generative AI will inevitably lead to. This Kendrick Lamar example, though, is perhaps one of the more egregious we’ve seen to date.

“I didn’t think we would get here this fast with the voice,” Guru writes.

“Of course, my mind goes to the ethical and legal aspects of what can be done with programs like Tacotron 2. You add that to the power of ChatGPT and you realize we are in a very groundbreaking but dangerous moments. It’s not the tech, it’s the evil that men do with the tech.”

“You can copyright a song, or a speech but not the voice itself!!! You can literally create a song or an album in the voice of your favorite musician. And this is just music. The ability to create a Manchurian Candidate scares me. Think about that in every industry.”

The use of Kendrick Lamar’s AI-generated voice is rather ironic, seeing as the rapper himself has dabbled with deepfake AI technology in the past. The music video for ‘The Heart Part 5’ sees the Compton emcee using AI to seamlessly transition his face into others including Kanye West and Will Smith.

Listen to the AI Kendrick Lamar song below and if you want to explore this type of AI even further you might want to head on over to Uberduck, which is an open source voice AI community that’s worth playing around with.