Universal Music Group and Google have started to discuss the prospect of officially licensing artists' voices for deepfakes, the Financial Times reports.
Both parties reportedly hope to develop a tool that would allow the public to create their own officially licensed deepfakes.
Presently, deepfakes are trained on machine learning programs to imitate the voices of singers without authorization; the phenomenon broke into public view with the April release of "heart on my sleeve," a song created with generated versions of Drake's and the Weeknd's voices.
The song gained significant viral success on streaming platforms before UMG forced its removal. Artists would be allowed to opt out of the platform, FT claims.
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