Liam Gallagher. Photo by Stefan Brending via Wikimedia Commons.
This past Friday (April 14), the British band Breezer released a “lost” Oasis album they’d created using AI. AISIS’ The Lost Tapes/Vol.1 was, in fact, written by Breezer, but the band is fronted by a digitally programmed Liam Gallagher. The project went viral in England over the weekend, with loathsome TV pundits such as Piers Morgan dropping it into their pre-loaded conversations about the threat of AI.
Now, Gallagher has responded, weighing in on the side of the band. Replying to a Twitter fan who asked him if he’d heard the record early this morning (April 19), he wrote, “Not the album heard a tune it’s better than all the other snizzle out there.” To another in the same thread, he wrote that the record was “Mad as fuck I sound mega.”
Gallagher’s positive feedback to his new viral avatar is decidedly different from the responses of Drake and The Weeknd to “heart on my sleeve,” a track by an artist named ghostwriter featuring AI-generated vocals that mimick the two pop stars’ voices. The song blew up across the internet, garnering hundreds of thousands of streams before being pulled from major DSPs Monday (April 17) at the request of Universal Music Group (the parent company of Republic Records, to which both artists are signed).
“[T]he training of generative AI using our artists’ music (which represents both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law) as well as the availability of infringing content created with generative AI on DSPs, begs the question as to which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation,” UMG wrote in a press statement. “These instances demonstrate why platforms have a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists.”
