“It seems reasonable to assume that a model and audio generated from copyrighted audio recordings would be considered derivative works.

For a deeper look into the copyright issues at play here, I highly suggest you read Baio’s analysis in full because he gets into the finer details of fair use and why Jay-Z’s claims may not hold up in court. The situation raises fascinating questions about what exactly is being infringed upon here if the synthetic voice is simply producing original content using the likeness of a celebrity. But you can’t chalk it up to those being free to use “We Didn't Start the Fire” is of course copyrighted, but Shakespeare’s works are public domain.Īll of Voice Synethesis’ videos are created by feeding Google’s open source Tacotron 2 text-to-speech model with Jay-Z songs and lyrics and having the synthetic voice read pre-written text. Weirdly enough, Jay-Z deepfake videos featuring the rapper’s synthetic voice rhyming the Book of Genesis and the infamous Navy Seal copypasta meme remain on YouTube. The channel itself has nearly 40,000 subscribers, and many of its videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The notices specifically cite AI, with Roc Nation writing, “this content unlawfully uses an AI to impersonate our client’s voice,” according to Baio’s conversations with the creator, who remains anonymous and goes by the online handle Voice Synthesis. In a strange turn of events, Roc Nation LLC, Jay-Z’s full-service entertainment agency, filed copyright strikes against the YouTube uploads of the above-mentioned deepfakes. In a fascinating deep dive from XOXO festival co-founder Andy Baio over at his website Waxy, Baio looks into AI-powered Jay-Z impersonations on YouTube, specifically one creator using Jay-Z’s iconic voice and hip-hop flow to rhyme classics like William Shakespeare's “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy from Hamlet and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Roc Nation has issued strikes against some Jay-Z audio deepfakes

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