A user has surfed the wave of a potential return of the American artist, selling for thousands of euros of titles generated by artificial intelligence.
Will artificial intelligence definitely change the face of the music industry, or just hurt it? With the rise of artificial intelligence, we have been able to hear the voices of dozens of renowned artists on songs that did not belong to them, but also new titles created from scratch with their voice thanks to AI .
This is particularly the case of Frank Ocean, whose stamp was the subject of a major scam, reports Vice. The American artist offered an ideal opportunity: his last official album was in 2016, and he hadn’t returned to the stage for six years, until an eventful appearance at the American music festival Coachella last April. On this occasion, he hinted in a mysterious way that a new album might be in the pipeline.
On the internet then appeared new alleged songs of the artist, with this detail that the interested party did not write the lyrics, nor even sing: everything was created thanks to artificial intelligence.
Behind this scam hides an internet user known as “mourningassasin”. The latter indicated to Vice that, among the various songs he published on a forum, at least one of them was really from the works of Frank Ocean: a way of building his credibility in order to be able to easily sell the wrong later.
“Everyone believed it”
As soon as it is published, it is solicited by dozens of purchase offers. “I immediately understood that everyone believed in it,” he told Vice. He claims to have amassed nearly 13,000 Canadian dollars (about 8,800 euros) thanks to this scam.
However, on many forums dedicated to the artist, fans were not fooled and quickly identified the deception. The scammer ended up admitting that the music was fake to the administrator of the forum on which they had sold it.
“This story has significantly damaged the credibility of our site, and will cause suspicion from any new unauthenticated seller in our communities,” said the administrator in question to Vice.
Neither Frank Ocean nor his entourage reacted to the situation. Separately, Soundcloud has removed all occurrences of music posted by “mourningassasin”, according to Vice. At the end of April, music streaming platforms had to organize themselves in the face of the enormous success of a fake duet between singers Drake and The Weeknd, now officially untraceable.
