"The singer of the big fire in 2003: Stefanie Sun; the singer of the big fire in 2023: AI Stefanie Sun". At Station B, this comment received more than 2,800 likes, and the one that was collectively liked by netizens was the video of Stefanie Sun singing other songs after using AI to clone her voice.
So far, the "AI Stefanie Sun" created by Up masters has covered more than a hundred songs, and some music playback platforms have even uploaded a cover compilation. Netizens enjoy enjoying "AI Stefanie Sun" singing various styles and singers Songs such as "Borrowing from the Sky for Another Five Hundred Years" and the recently popular "Dig, Dig", the contrast is undoubtedly an important reason for the popularity of "AI Stefanie Sun".
Not only "AI Stefanie Sun", but also "AI Wang Xinling" and "AI Jay Chou" were created by the open source voice training model in the "skillful hands" of netizens. When AI cover songs became a new electronic toy, the ensuing infringement issues also attracted attention.
Overseas, there have been cases where AI imitation voice cover has caused music companies to sue for "infringement". Xiao Sa, a partner of Beijing Dacheng Law Firm, believes that my country's "Civil Code" also clearly stipulates the protection of the voice of natural persons. With reference to the relevant provisions on the protection of portrait rights, without the consent of the voice owner, others are not allowed to publish, copy, Use or publish the voice of the voice owner in the form of distribution, rental, exhibition, etc. Accordingly, AI imitating the star's voice violates the personality rights of the singer's voice.
In addition, Xiao Sa pointed out that AI imitation singing other people's songs also has the problem of copyright infringement, unless the user uses the AI singer only for personal study, research or appreciation, and does not affect the normal use of the original work, nor does it damage the rights of the copyright owner. Legal rights and interests, "Otherwise the act of singing without permission generally constitutes an infringement."
"AI Stefanie Sun" explosive imitation sound model was "broken"
Last summer, singer Wang Xinling became popular with "Love You" on Sister Lang's stage, triggering a wave of "nostalgic style" imitation shows on short video websites. This year, before the seniors in the music scene sang at Sister Lang, netizens had already enjoyed various songs sung by "Sun Yanzi", who was once known as one of the "Four Little Queens", at Station B.
Whether it is "Ningxia", "Later", "Little Love in a Big City" and other classic pop songs of others, or "Borrowing from the Heaven for Another Five Hundred Years" which is almost impossible for the queen to sing, or even the Internet pop song "Dig, Dig, Dig" "Dig" is being sung by "Sun Yanzi". Of course, the singer is not Tianhou herself, but her AI imitation voice.
There are a lot of cover songs of "AI Stefanie Sun" on station B
As "AI Stefanie Sun" became popular, "AI Wang Xinling" and "AI Jay Chou" also appeared on station B. The emergence of AI cover singing is related to the higher quality and easier use of imitation sound applications than before.
If you search for keywords such as "AI cover song" and "sound cloning" on the Internet, you will find a lot of tutorials. Most of the tutorials mention So-VITS-SVC, an open source AI project that uses a timbre conversion algorithm.
Using this voice training model, it only takes three steps to make an AI cover song: use some audio software to separate the accompaniment and vocals in the song, split the vocal audio into small segments of 5 seconds to 15 seconds; The sound file is used to train the target timbre model through the program in So-VITS-SVC; finally, the model is used to infer and predict the target conversion file, and the AI cover song must be obtained.
Some netizens who have followed the tutorial said that even a novice can produce AI cover songs that are three to five points similar to the original singer after a few hours of learning.
At present, the playback volume of various AI cover videos is not as good as that of "AI Stefanie Sun". Why is Stefanie Sun's voice out of popularity by AI imitation?
A creator at Station B responded to netizens that he also tried the timbre conversion of singers such as Jay Chou, Lin Junjie, and Faye Wong, but the effect was not as good as Stefanie Sun's. have characteristics", so it is more appropriate to cover other songs.
In addition to fans wanting to hear a certain singer cover other people's songs too much, the AI imitation "like" and "unlike" singers have become the focus of discussion among netizens, and let a certain singer sing a song with a "contrasting" style. , is also a factor for some videos to get high traffic.
As a result, a "stage" that was impossible to achieve in reality appeared. Netizens not only used AI to cover "Fancy Whole Work", but also stimulated a group of "rebels" from the past music circle memories. For example, Xu Song's "Funeral of Roses" was widely questioned as an imitation of Jay Chou's style, and netizens simply asked "AI Jay Chou" to cover this song; "Na Ying" sang Dao Lang's "Lover".
Netizens asked "AI Naying" to cover Dao Lang's song
In the comment section of these alternative AI cover videos, netizens were brainstorming on the way of gossip: "Next time I want to hear Hebe Tien sing Lin Junjie's "Practice Love", Deng Ziqi sing Lin Youjia's "Waste", Zhang Bichen sing Hua Chenyu's "Waste" Dust in Fireworks." Some people expect that AI can "regenerate" the voices of some dead singers, "Will we be able to hear Huang Jiaju and Zhang Yusheng singing new songs in the future?"
AI cover singing is an infringement both at home and abroad
The AI imitation sound can be understood by some netizens, and the legal boundary has also attracted widespread attention because of "AI Stefanie Sun". So far, Stefanie Sun and her agency have not spoken out about it.
Overseas, the use of AI technology to clone singer A's voice to cover singer B's songs has sparked infringement complaints. In late April, someone used AI technology to sing the song "Heart on My Sleeve" with the voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd. More than 600,000.
Soon, the song caught the attention of Universal Music Group, the record company to which Drake and The Weeknd belong. James Murtagh-Hopkins, vice president of the company, issued a statement, "Using the voices of our artists to train and generate content is against violated our agreement and violated copyright law."
Under the complaint of Universal Music, "Heart on My Sleeve" sung by AI imitation voice has been removed from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music and other major platforms. In addition, Universal Music Group also requires music streaming platforms such as Spotify to cut off the AI company's access to its internal music and prevent developers from using copyrighted music to train AI models.
Using unauthorized singer data to train AI models will be sued for infringement overseas, so is there any infringement in "AI cover singing" in China? Some netizens are curious, does training the model with the voice of a well-known singer infringe the copyright of the singer's voice? Does "AI Stefanie Sun" sing the songs of other singers infringe the copyright of others?
In this regard, Xiao Sa, a partner of Beijing Dacheng Law Firm, told "Metaverse Daily Explosion" that the statement of sound copyright is not accurate enough. Copyright refers to copyright in the legal context of our country. Naturally, human voice cannot be a copyright, but in fact it involves the infringement of the personality rights of others.
Xiao Sa explained that my country's "Civil Code" clearly stipulates the protection of the voice of natural persons, and can refer to the relevant provisions on the protection of portrait rights. As far as portrait rights are concerned, Article 1019 of the Civil Code stipulates that "without the consent of the portrait rights holder, the portrait work obligee shall not use or disclose the portrait rights portrait of man". According to the aforementioned regulations, without the consent of the voice owner, others are not allowed to use or disclose the voice of the voice owner by means of publication, reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, etc. Accordingly, the existence of AI imitation voice violates the personal rights of the star's voice.
As for whether AI's repertoire of other real singers infringes music copyright, Xiao Sa analyzed that the production of a song often involves many rights holders, and its copyright system is relatively complicated. Specifically, it may include the following rights subjects and content: the song The copyright of the songwriter; the right of the singer of the song as a performer; the right of the relevant record company and music company as the producer of the audio and video.
"Therefore, AI cover songs may naturally infringe the singer's related rights, especially when the singer is also the songwriter of the song," Xiao Sa pointed out, unless the user uses the AI singer only for personal study, research or appreciation, And it does not affect the normal use of the original work, nor does it damage the legitimate rights and interests of the copyright owner. "Otherwise, the act of singing without permission generally constitutes infringement."
It can be seen that whether it is domestic or foreign, using the singer's voice and works to train AI to cover other people's songs is likely to constitute infringement from the perspective of personality rights and copyright. So, if someone uses his own voice to train an AI singer, does the work produced by this AI singer enjoy the copyright of the work?
In this regard, Xiao Sa believes that as long as the works sung by AI singers are original, they can be recognized as works in the sense of copyright law and thus be protected by law. , therefore, it does not enjoy copyright, and the copyright of this work should be enjoyed by the users, creators or operators of AI singers."
With the development of AI large-scale models towards multimodality, more and more people start to use AIGC to create text, pictures and even audio and video works, and the copyright protection issues related to AIGC are also becoming more and more prominent.
Although my country's "Copyright Law" and other relevant copyright protection laws have no clauses on restricting AI infringement, and there are very few cases of AI infringement in public judgments, Xiao Sa believes that this does not mean that AI infringement does not Existence, "Actually, in recent years, cases of artificial intelligence infringing personality rights such as portrait rights and copyrights are not uncommon, and some courts have recognized the protection of artificial intelligence-generated works. Therefore, artificial intelligence technology should still be used with caution.