While use of AI has been highly controversial, with Universal Music Group recently pulling a song that used cloned voices of Drake and The Weekend from streaming services while citing it was a “copyright violation”, it seems that Grimes is happy for people to create music using versions of her voice created by artificial intelligence.
In a tweet shared on Sunday evening, she wrote: "I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings."
Grimes, who shares two children with Elon Musk, went on to add: "I think it's cool to be fused w a machine and I like the idea of open sourcing all art and killing copyright".
In another tweet, she explained: "We're making a program that should simulate my voice well but we could also upload stems and samples for people to train their own."
She welcomed her second child with Elon Musk in December 2021.
When one fan questioned her, saying splitting royalties was "too good to be true", Grimes added further context on the payment method. She wrote: "We don't have time to sign ppl and I don't wanna own ppls music but we think we can devise smart contracts that wud automatically upload ppls stuff and pay them - still checking on what's possible but i think we're close to just providing this as a public service basically."
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Another person questioned her about the misleading nature of AI, to which she responded: “We expect a certain amount of chaos. grimes is an art project, not a music project. The ultimate goal has always been to push boundaries rather than have a nice song. The point is to poke holes in the simulation and see what happens even if it's a bad outcome for us.”
Grimes' comments come after Universal Music Group took action by taking down an AI-generated song that used the voices of Drake and The Weeknd.
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They wrote in a statement: UMG's success has been, in part, due to embracing new technology and putting it to work for our artists–as we have been doing with our own innovation around AI for some time already. With that said, however, the training of generative AI using our artists' music (which represents both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law) as well as the availability of infringing content created with generative AI on DSPs, begs the question as to 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.
"These instances demonstrate why platforms have a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists. We're encouraged by the engagement of our platform partners on these issues–as they recognise they need to be part of the solution."
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