Author| clearly
Edit| Put blue
Who is currently at the top of the music scene? It is not Yi Yangqianxi, who has just released a new album, nor Mayday and Jay Chou, who are difficult to find for a concert, but "AI Sun Yanzi".
At station B, the "Hair Like Snow" uploaded by UP master "Chen Mopu 1995" has exceeded 1.7 million views, and other millions of views include "AI Sun Yanzi" and "cover" of "Peninsula Iron Box" and "Love in front of the Western Yuan" and so on. From "Mercury", "Melody" to "Good Han Song", from Nanquan Mama, Jay Chou, Tao Zhe to Liu Huan, thousands of tracks do not have the style that "AI Sun Yanzi" cannot interpret. Its popularity even transmitted to the capital market, on May 11, Gravity Media, Yaowang Technology Sealing Board, Huashu Media, Tianyu Digital Technology and other "AI, virtual human concept stocks" once rose to the limit.
In addition, "AI Jay Chou" and "AI Faye Wong" also appeared, and a fan "directly ordered the idol" wish. Someone smells traffic passwords and business opportunities. In addition to the platform share, there are also people who take the opportunity to sell tutorials. On platforms such as QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music, cover albums have appeared. The cyber life of "AI singers" is destined to be short-lived, and there is a trend of declining popularity, and some songs have been removed, but they reflect various problems.
What is clear is that these "AI singers" are on the edge of the gray area of "infringement". At the music festival, some fans asked Sun Yanzi her opinion on "AI Sun Yanzi", and she only responded with a smile that "I have heard of it". Its brokerage firm clarified that it has not appointed a lawyer to handle the matter. The controversy of AI infringement has accompanied the whole process of the birth of AIGC technology, and has never been settled and properly resolved, and the "AI singer" is only one of them, and it is far from the last.
"Clone singers" frequently appear in the music industry: infringement disputes under the imbalance between supply and demand
AI singers are not new today, but can be traced back to the birth of AI-driven virtual idols. In 2007, the originator of virtual idols, Hatsune Miku, was based on the electronic speech synthesis software VOCALOID2 engine, using the voice source of voice actor Fujita, and five years later, the voice of Luo Tianyi, the first Chinese virtual idol in China, was originally synthesized based on the VOCALOID3 engine, copying Hatsune Miku's operating model.
The now popular AI voice replacement software has realized a "high-imitation version of personal exclusive concert". Especially in the case of high ticket prices and seconds at this year's concert, and the mismatch between market supply and demand, with the conscious impetus, fans and uploaders completed a "conspiracy" and carnival. What excites fans is not only the curiosity about new technologies, the "cross-border collision" of the king and queen, but also the "compensation" psychology of idols with emotional filters who have not released new songs for a long time.
Just as AI painting trains AI to imitate its painting style with the works of painters, "feeding" more singers to disclose audio data, you can get more accurate training results, so that it can achieve more than eighty percent similarity in timbre imitation. The reason why Sun Yanzi is the most favored is because her voice and breath have a strong degree of recognition, clear words, stable vocal range, and easy training results, at the same time, Sun Yanzi is also the first singer to be "open source", with innate advantages.
It is understood that the work uses AI tone replacement technology (Sovits 4.0), the source of which is the so-vits-svc model, which needs to be downloaded including the so-vits-svc integration package, as well as the software used to split the audio vocals and background, and the software that splits the audio and preprocesses the data. The "dry" audio obtained after removing the instruments, accompaniment, reverb, and harmony can train the singer's voice model, and then replace the "dry sound" of the original song to obtain a new "cover song".
Of course, AI singers can't do 100% restoration. A veteran fan commented in the barrage: "At first glance, it sounds very similar, but the emotions and singing tone are not very similar." This is related to Sun Yanzi's personal style, she rarely sings "high notes" in the past, and singers who are closer can achieve better results, and a song is not only a technique, but also a synthesis of emotional resonance.
Most songs have "disclaimers" underneath, but infringement is still not avoidable. What rights may AI singers infringe? According to some lawyers, "the scope of works protected by the mainland Copyright Law includes written works, oral works, music, fine art works, etc., while sound does not belong to one of the aforementioned types of protection, and the timbre itself does not constitute a work and is not protected by the mainland Copyright Law." "Unauthorized "cloned covers" may damage the legitimate copyrights of the original songwriters, singers, and sound recording producers, and may also infringe on the name rights, portrait rights and commercial reputation of the relevant singers. The covers generated by these codes are not in themselves "intellectual achievements based on human intellectual activities" and are not protected by the Copyright Law.
If AI singers are still in the stage of self-entertainment, Chen Shanni took the initiative to embrace "singer AI". In March this year, singer Chen Shanni announced on social platforms that her new song "Teach Me How to Be Your Lover" released on March 14 was sung by her own AI model, and the cover was also generated by AI. She "tuned" for a year, pronunciation, breathing, and harmony were all done by AI. In her opinion, if the era of AI is bound to come, as a creator, we may not care about "whether we will be replaced", but "what else can we do", and her experiments prove that producers are the core link in music creation.
In the music industry, AIGC technology is mainly used in composition and singing mentioned above, but it is based on "infringement". "The essence of AI composition is still plagiarism and washing songs." Lin Ke, a senior music practitioner, said: "Many related AI composition companies were concepts before, and it was impossible to really write a song by AI, but AI can generate a simple MIDI sound source, and then the producer adds it on this basis. To say that the more positive application is to simplify the demo process, but these demos are also cobbled together and edited by other songs. ”
Different from the simple "singing imitation" of AI Sun Yanzi, some foreign users tried to train AI to be "original", allowing the "clone" Drake and The Weeknd to sing "Heart On My Sleeve" together, and the song was played more than 20 million times. Universal Music Group, the two artists' signed label, issued a scathing statement of condemnation: "Using our artists to train AI-generated content violates both our agreement and copyright law." Platforms are asked to make a choice, "on the side of artists, fans and human creativity, or on the side of deepfakes, scammers and depriving artists of the compensation they deserve." Apple Music and others subsequently removed the song.
Unlike music companies that are directly endangering copyright income, many singers have a more open attitude, which also makes "AI song washing" in an ambiguous area. Canadian singer Grimes has said she is "happy to use her voice," asking for a 50 percent royalty and launched an open source software Elf.tech in May specifically designed to replicate her voice.
After the full-scale invasion of AI, the gray space of increasing "entropy" is increasing
AIGC technology is "in full bloom". On April 21, CG artist Ruan Jia challenged A on Weibo, posting a sketch of the Valkyrie in the Elden Law Ring that he had drawn, inviting netizens to use AI to draw. A number of cyber-face Internet celebrities appeared in Xiaohongshu, from classical style to pure desire wind, rising more than 10,000 fans, causing a certain impact on real Internet celebrities, once "hands" are AI-generated problems, so these beauties often carry or cover their hands, but with the evolution of technology, "hands" are no longer difficult.
At the same time, AI anchors are also invading Douyin. These anchors can complete simple communication, such as introducing discounts, giving logistics information, etc., but cannot achieve real emotional communication, intelligent interaction, and cannot cope with emergencies, but for the late-night live broadcast of the "24-hour live broadcast room", it is enough. The cost of exclusive image customization plus voice customization in the early stage is nearly 10,000, and the software fee is paid every month in the later stage, and the public model does not need to be customized, only needs to pay a few hundred yuan of software fees per month, and there is no real anchor commission. Businesses may pay only one-tenth of what a live streamer can do.
A recent news abroad has made more people who have joined the wave see the possibility of attracting money. Scarlett Johansson's sci-fi film "Her" "starring in the voice" has become a reality today. Caryn Marjorie, an American Internet celebrity with millions of followers, partnered with artificial intelligence company Forever Voices to launch an AI voice chatbot, which tested thousands of users, almost all of them men, and made more than $70,000 in a week. Just like when entertainment live streaming was just emerging, this kind of companionship service for the opposite sex is bound to have a lot of "edge ball" and gray space.
On the one hand, the AI double-edged sword may make up for regrets, such as the "resurrection" of deceased singers such as Teresa Teng, Huang Jiaju, Yao Beina, and Leslie Cheung. On the other hand, while liberating productivity, actively promoting "cost reduction and efficiency increase" in various production chains of the entertainment industry, and even stimulating the stock price of the entertainment sector to soar, AIGC technology has also brought more ethical issues and infringement issues, which may be applied to telecom fraud, fake news and so on.
The same AI image and speech will fall into the question of shoddy homogenization, destroy the platform content ecology, and even lead to a decline in user attractiveness, so it is bound to be "locked in a cage". For regulators, AI tools intended to liberate productivity, if excessive abuse, will produce a series of infringement problems, hinder the progress of science and technology, creativity, will put the cart before the horse, so neither regulators nor platforms will stand idly by for the excessive application of AI technology.
On April 11, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued the Measures for the Administration of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services (Draft for Comments), which establishes "barriers" on privacy, intellectual property rights, training data, and unfair competition, focusing on the legality of training data, not infringing intellectual property rights, and AI tool providers should bear the responsibility of generating content producers. It can be seen that the official announcement of AI technology management measures may be ushered in in the near future.
On May 9, the Douyin platform released an initiative for AI-generated content, prohibiting the use of generative AI technology to create and publish infringing content, including but not limited to portrait rights, intellectual property rights, etc., and will be severely punished if discovered; Publishers are also required to prominently identify AI-generated content and add a uniform official "watermark." For pure AI-driven anchors, the platform mentioned: "When using registered avatars for live broadcasting, real-time interaction must be driven by real people, and interaction driven by completely AI is not allowed." "This means that live-driven virtual streamers are allowed, while pure AI-driven streamers are banned.
In "The Wandering Earth 2", Andy Lau's scientist Tu Hengyu finally chose to embrace digital life, allowing his daughter Yaya to change from a "2-minute memory" to a "complete life". This "black mirror" scene is becoming a reality. The "entropy increase" of the disorderly gray space may be difficult to avoid and can only be continuously regulated, and the real replacement and impact of AI on repetitive basic work will come in a few years.