Drake isn’t a fan of his voice being cloned by artificial intelligence to cover Ice Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U).”
The OVO Sound boss has become the latest A-list artist to be targeted by AI voice technology, with a digitally-generated rendition of him rapping the Bronx rookie’s breakout hit going viral.
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Needless to say, hearing AI Drake rap sassy, sexually-assured lines like, “N-gga a eater, he ate it for lunch/ Bitch, I’m a baddie, I get what I want” left many fans in stitches.
“They got the Drake AI rapping Ice Spice’s Munch & I’m weak af!” one person wrote on Twitter, while another declared: “Ai drake singing ice spice is the best thing that happened this month so far.”
Even Drake himself caught wind of the viral clip after The Shade Room reposted it on Instagram along with a number of other AI-generated covers from Rihanna, Kanye West and Travis Scott. However, he wasn’t impressed.
“This the final straw AI,” he wrote underneath a screenshot of the aforementioned post on his Instagram Stories on Thursday (April 13).
Drake’s AI “Munch” cover arrives amid growing concern about artificial intelligence within the music industry. According to the Financial Times, Universal Music Group just recently asked major streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music to block AI platforms from using its music to “train” their technology.
“We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent the unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators,” a rep for UMG said. “We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists.”
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JAY-Z’s longtime engineer Young Guru echoed a similar sentiment earlier this year, issuing a grave warning about the potential legal and ethical implications of people having their voices cloned by artificial intelligence.
“We are in a very groundbreaking but dangerous moment. It’s not the tech, it’s the evil that men do with the tech,” he wrote on Instagram after stumbling on a video of someone creating a song from scratch using a voice filter to make them sound exactly like Kendrick Lamar.
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“There are legal aspects because at this present moment you can’t copyright a voice. (Midler v. Ford Motor Co.). 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.”
He added: “The law has to change to protect everyone not just Public Figures. And the super scary part is that we are just getting started, we feed the beast constantly everyday with more and more content to be studied. Maybe the Luddites had a point. The book by Gavin Mueller ‘Breaking Things At Work’ starts to take on a way more urgent role!!”
While Drake may not enjoy hearing himself perform “Munch (Feelin’ U),” he has been supportive of Ice Spice since she rose to fame last year. As the 23-year-old recalled in a RapCaviar interview last September, the Her Loss hitmaker sent her a DM praising her musical talents before she flew out to Toronto to attend his 2022 October World Weekend Festival.
“When Drake DM’d me, I did not really expect that,” she said. “I had just landed in L.A. for my GeniusOpen Mic for ‘Munch,’ and he was actually like, ‘Yo, ‘Munch’ is hard and your On the Radar freestyle is hard.’ And I was like, ‘Damn, that’s crazy because I’m really in L.A. about to shoot the Open Mic.’”
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She added: “Linking up with him was so cool. Like, he’s mad nice and respectful. We went to OVO Fest. It was exciting because it was like his first time performing in Toronto, I think in like a couple of years. So it was just a movie, everybody was excited. The energy was high. Nicki [Minaj] performed, it was lit. [Lil] Wayne did his thing. That shit was crazy.”
Their budding relationship appeared to sour soon after, though, when Drake allegedly unfollowed Ice Spice on Instagram and subliminally dissed her on “BackOutsideBoyz,” on which he rapped: “She a 10 tryna rap, it’s good on mute.” “At least ima 10 [shrug emoji] [crying face emoji],” Spice tweeted in response.
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Drake has since refollowed Ice Spice on Instagram, while the latter recently clarified they have since patched things up.
“We’re cool,” Spice said in an interview with The New York Times in January. “We spoke after that a couple times and we’re good. There’s no beef.”
