Bad Bunny not happy about AI track using his voice

By Riyah CollinsBBC Newsbeat Rapper Bad Bunny has released a furious rant about a viral TikTok song that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to replicate his voice. The track has hundreds of thousands of views and also uses fake vocals from Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee.

By Riyah CollinsBBC Newsbeat

Getty Images Bad Bunny at the Billboard Latin Music Awards 2023. Bad Bunny is a Puerto Rican man in his late 20s. He has a short dark beard and wears a black cap twisted back on his head. He is dressed in denim dungarees over a sleeveless white vest. He has a number of tattoos covering his arms and holds a microphone to his face with his right arm while pointing upwards to the crowd with his left. He is pictured on stage lit by a red spotlight with smoke around himGetty ImagesThe rapper is definitely not a happy bunny about the new AI track using his voice

Rapper Bad Bunny has released a furious rant about a viral TikTok song that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to replicate his voice.

The track has hundreds of thousands of views and also uses fake vocals from Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee.

In a post on his WhatsApp channel, Bad Bunny said anyone who liked the song NostalgIA should leave the group chat.

"You don't deserve to be my friends," the singer wrote in Spanish. "I don't want them on the tour either."

The track was uploaded by a user under the name flowgptmusic, but there's no evidence to say they're linked to the AI platform FlowGPT - which is powered in a similar way to ChatGPT.

Bad Bunny - real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio - also used expletives to describe the song in his post on WhatsApp, where he has 19 million followers.

The Monaco and Fina singer, 29, has more than 83 million monthly listeners on Spotify and is rumoured to be in a relationship with model Kendall Jenner - but the pair haven't confirmed this publicly.

BBC Newsbeat has approached Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny's record label for a comment about the AI track.

Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee haven't publicly commented on it, but Newsbeat has reached out to them too.

It's not the first time stars have hit out at AI-generated tracks.

In April, Drake and The Weeknd had their voices cloned for Heart On My Sleeve by a creator known as @ghostwriter.

The song went viral online and later had to be removed from Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer after Drake said it was "the final straw".

The software works by analysing huge amounts of music in order to create something new - but there are currently no clear laws in place about who owns the copyright.

However, some people in the industry have said AI can be a useful tool for creating music and the technology should be embraced.

In an interview with the BBC, the boss of Spotify said it wouldn't ban AI tracks from the platform, but drew the line at artists' voices being cloned.

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