Jay-Z takes legal action against ‘deepfakes’ of his likeness rapping Billy Joel and Hamlet

Jay-Z’s company has taken action against a YouTube channel which created ‘deepfake’ videos that mimic the rapper’s voice.

Roc Nation filed takedown notices against two videos created by Vocal Synthesis that use ‘artificial intelligence to make [Jay-Z] rap Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire and Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy,’ The Guardian reported on Wednesday.

Although the two videos were initially taken down, as of Wednesday they were back up on the video streaming site. 

A statement by the anonymous creator of Vocal Synthesis read, ‘The Jay-Z videos are back up now, and my copyright strike has been removed!’ 

‘I’m not sure exactly what happened; I guess either YouTube reversed its decision or Roc Nation dropped its claim. Thanks a lot to everyone who publicized this!’  

According to the channel the videos in question are ‘entirely computer-generated using a text-to-speech model trained on the speech patterns of Jay-Z’.

Roc Nation’s initial complaint with the videos were that they ‘unlawfully [use] an AI to impersonate our client’s voice’. 

Vocal Synthesis responded to the complaint -via synthesized ‘deepfake’ voices mimicking President Barack Obama and Donald Trump- that the videos had ‘no malicious purpose’.

They also said they were ‘disappointed that Jay-Z and Roc Nation have decided to bully a small YouTuber in this way’. 

Deepfakes are so named because they are made using deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to create fake videos of a target individual.

They are made by feeding a computer an algorithm, or set of instructions, as well as lots of images and audio of the target person.

The computer program then learns how to mimic the person’s facial expressions, mannerisms, voice and inflections.

With enough video and audio of someone, you can combine a fake video of a person with fake audio and get them to say anything you want.