Recently, a track called “Heart on My Sleeve” by an unknown TikTok user named Ghostwriter (or “@ghostwriter977”) appeared out of nowhere and went viral across various social media platforms, reaching tens of millions of users before being taken down. The track sounds (according music critics and fans) convincingly like a collaboration between the artists Drake and The Weekend, which one would expect to be a major event. But it’s not. It was created by Ghostwriter, using AI-generated vocals trained to sound like those artists. The entre track is a fake: a product of the explosion of new tools based on generative AI.

Over the past few months those AI voice tools have been more widely released, and they work. It is trivial to use them to create a track that sounds, to the casual listener, like it was recorded by the famous artist of your choosing, and the micro-genre of AI-generated “covers” of existing songs by anomalous artists (or other public figures, like President Biden) has exploded on TikTok. So what legal recourse, if any, do these artists have?