Young Guru is among the many musicians who is not pleased about the direction in which the music industry is headed with regard to artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday (September 6), the veteran producer and audio engineer shared a screenshot of a Variety article reporting that an AI-generated song featuring inauthentic vocals by Drake and The Weeknd is now eligible for Grammy Awards.
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“HATE TO SAY I TOLD Y’ALL BUT I TOLD Y’ALL,” he wrote. “NOW THIS COULD BE UP FOR A GRAMMY. SMH.”
The Roc-A-Fella studio chef, who himself won a Grammy in 2019 for his work on Everything Is Love by The Carters, has been a vocal critic of artificial intelligence in music. Check out his latest post about it below:
Young Guru speaks out against Drake & The Weeknd AI Grammys submission: "I told y'all" https://t.co/52WCdDsvQrpic.twitter.com/SWuC0M3tKi
— HipHopDX (@HipHopDX) September 7, 2023
Drake and The Weeknd have worked together and made hits before, but they never even participated in the aforementioned AI track that is now being considered for two Grammy Awards.
“Heart On My Sleeve” is a song composed and arranged by Ghostwriter, who processed vocals via artificial intelligence to mirror the voices of both singers without their actual touch. Despite its controversial presence in the music space, the song did well when it was released this spring and has continued making the rounds despite being taken down multiple times.
Speaking about the track’s eligibility for music’s highest accolade, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told the New York Times: “It’s absolutely eligible because it was written by a human.”
A representative of Ghostwriter has confirmed that the song in question will be considered for Best Rap Song and Song of the Year — both of these reward writing and composing rather than performance.
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Soon after “Heart on My Sleeve” went live earlier this year, Universal Music Group issued a statement on the use of artificial intelligence in music. In it, they asked “which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation.”
