YouTube’s Dream Track: Exploring Generative Artificial Intelligence Platforms to Support Artists’ Creative Processes in the 21st Century

In a demo of Dream Track, a user simply types in a prompt — in this case, “a ballad about how opposites attract, upbeat acoustic” — and the system spits out this short clip of a new song, sung by pop star Charlie Puth’s voice clone with a stylistically relevant backing track.

In an email to NPR, Google said these tools are currently in a pilot phase. They are currently being tested by a large group of U.S.-based content creators who are already connected to the internet giant.

“Being a part of YouTube’s Dream Track experiment is an opportunity to help shape possibilities for the future,” said John Legend. I am an artist and I like the idea of seeing what creators come up with during this time.

“I’m grateful that this new development involves the artists, perhaps meaning they are being compensated for their contribution to this,” said singer-songwriter and voice actor Dan Navarro. The commoditization of music, like so much toothpaste from a tube, leads me to wonder where the inspiration is. I believe not at all.

At a time when there are many issues, it is difficult to understand how the latest music toy comes at a tricky time. Generative AI creates something of a digital minefield when it comes to copyright, and YouTube, which Google owns, has been trying to handle both an influx of AI-made music and the fact that it has agreements with labels to pay when artists’ work shows up on the platform. A few months ago, when “Heart on My Sleeve”—an AI-generated song by “Drake” and “The Weeknd”—went viral, it was ultimately pulled from several streaming services following complaints from the artists’ label, Universal Music Group.

“We have a fundamental responsibility to our artists to ensure the digital ecosystem evolves to protect them and their work against unauthorized exploitation, including by generative AI platforms,” said UMG chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge in a statement to NPR. To achieve their greatest creative and commercial potential, we need to provide them with the kinds of opportunities and cutting-edge creative tools made possible by artificial intelligence.

The Silence of Troye Sivan: Why it’s Hard to Just Write a Song, or Why You Can’t Count It?

The entertainment business will be more widespread thanks to Schuyler Moore, a partner at Greenberg Glusker.

Moore said he expects licensing deals between tech and entertainment companies around compensating AI spin-offs to become standard in the near future, especially given the fact right of publicity laws vary widely from state to state, and federal legislation is still only in the very early stages of being developed.

“Whoever gets paid for [their voice clone] will be happy because they’ll be able to sit at home and not have to go to a recording session. He said that people will go to have fun using those clones.

Even if you didn’t watch last weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live, you still probably saw it. You can already tell that I am referring to Timothée Chalamet, and the other cast members, who are in red undies. The sketch says he was an Australian twinkturned pop star and model turned actor who was played by an American actor who couldn’t do an Australian accent. They were called Troye Sivan SleepDemons, and had been haunting straight women all over the place. It was quite amusing and the least frightening of Sivan impressions to come out this week.

My freak-out about this isn’t a fear of a million fake Troy Sivan’s haunting my dreams; it’s that the most creative work shouldn’t be this easy, it should be difficult. To borrow from A League of Their Own’s Jimmy Dugan, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great. Asking a machine to make a song about fishing in the style of Charli XCX is entertaining, but it is not as good as a song written for other people, as it is full of her attitude. To borrow again, from a sign hoisted during the Hollywood writers strike, “ChatGPT doesn’t have childhood trauma.”