Ice Cube has expressed that he doesn’t like A.I.-generated songs, and he’s willing to sue over his likeness.
During an interview with the Full Send podcast on Friday (May 19), the hosts asked Cube whether he heard the artificial intelligence track mimicking Drake and The Weeknd called “Heart On My Sleeve.”
The Mount Westmore emcee responded, voicing his disapproval of the “demonic” practice. “I don’t wanna hear an A.I. Drake song,” the veteran said. “Yeah, I don’t wanna hear that bullsh*t. He should sue whoever made it.”
When the host responded by saying that “A.I.’s coming for you, too,” Cube insisted that a lawsuit would follow. “Yeah, and I’m a sue the muthaf**ka who made it and the people and the platform who play it. It’s like a sample. Somebody can’t take your original voice and manipulate it without having to pay…I think A.I. is demonic [and] I think A.I. is going to get a backlash from organic people.”
And AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted isn’t the only musician voicing his concerns about artificial intelligence. In February 2023, Young Guru lashed out on Instagram after hearing an A.I.-generated Kendrick Lamar track.
“This has dominated my Howard group chat for a couple of days,” the 49-year-old wrote on Instagram. A video showing how the fake Kendrick came together accompanied his post.
“Ok, I’m at the point where I can voice my concerns with our current state of A.I. I have followed many versions of what A.I. could do for years. I remember being at MIT and students showing me a project where they were actively feeding a computer ‘All’ the jazz records that ever existed.”
“Of course, my mind goes to the ethical and legal aspects of what can be done with programs like Tacotron 2. […] It’s not the tech; it’s the evil that men do with the tech. There are legal aspects because, at this present moment, you can’t copyright a voice…You can copyright a song or a speech but not the voice itself!!! You can literally create a song or an album in the voice of your favorite musician. And this is just music. The ability to create a Manchurian Candidate scares me. Think about that in every industry. There are still states that don’t even have a law against revenge porn,” he concluded in his IG post.