Jay-Z has become an unlikely source of inspiration within the budding community of artificial intelligence-powered impersonation. The hip-hop mogul’s record label has taken notice and issued copyright strikes to shut some of it down.

This is the world of safe-for-work, audio-only deepfakes that dabble mostly in parody, as well as putting on display the technical sophistication the field has produced in just a few short years time.

The XOXO festival co-founder takes a look at the AI-powered Jay-Z impersonations on YouTube.

The notices cite AI, with RoC nation writing,’this content unlawfully uses an AI to impersonate our client’s voice’. The channel itself has nearly 40,000 subscribers, and many of its videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

Jay-Z deepfake videos featuring the rapper’s synthetic voice rhyming the book of Genesis and the Navy seal copypasta meme remain on YouTube.’we did n’t start the fire’ is of course copyrighted, but Shakespeare’s works are public domain.

The videos are created by feeding Google’s open source tacotron 2 text-to-speech model with Jay-Z songs and lyrics. Jay-Z’s claims may not hold up in court.

Baio uses an example of a record producer featuring Jay-Z on a new single without his permission as an obvious legal transgression. He argues that vocal synthesis may be in the right here.

After reviewing the DMCA takedown requests for the videos in question, we determined that they were incomplete.’pending additional information from the claimant, we have temporarily reinstated the videos’.

Some US states have banned political candidates from disseminating deepfakes to try and influence an election. Virginia last year expanded its revenge porn laws to cover computer-generated images and video.

The account creator says he was surprised to receive the takedown order.’this was the first time YouTube has removed a video for impersonating a voice using AI,’ he says.

A well-known celebrity took notice when he became the subject. Youtube’s decision to reinstate the videos seems to illustrate that the copyright argument may not hold water.

Voice synthesis argues that mimicking a celebrity’s voice using an AI model should be treated differently. I do n’t really understand why why why I do N” T understand why I’m not a lawyer and have not studied intellectual property law,’ he argues.

Roc nation does n’t list phone numbers or email addresses on its website for contacting the company or its record label subsidiary.