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.”
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.”
Twitter content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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.”