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February 26, 2020

An A.I. produced Travis Scott-like song - what will the humans controlling the A.I. do with that power?

Earlier this month, an ad agency space150 shared a song and music video called 'Jack Park Canny Dope Man', credited to an A.I. called “Travisbott”, based on Travis Scott’s original music and lyrics. The song was lousy, but it raises a serious question: How do we deal with the sampling and reproduction of an existing artist’s musical likeness when someone completely unrelated stands to profit from it? Holly Herndon, who collaborated with A.I. on her last album, raised the issue: A.I. is getting better at sounding like human beings, so what will the humans controlling the A.I. do with that power? Herndon told the Fader that she saw something like Travisbott coming: “I think we're going to see a flood of automated compositions, people using neural nets to extract the logic from other people's work and a lot of appropriation. We're going to see big issues around attribution”.