A new song featuring the voices of rapper Drake and The Weeknd has been removed from music streaming services. The two Canadian artists are not involved in the song at all: it was created by artificial intelligence. According to the record company Universal Music Group, it is a copyright infringement.

the number Heart on my sleeve It appeared on social media on Friday and quickly went viral. On Tiktok it got more than 8 million views in a few days and on YouTube different variants of the song have already been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

The song was posted by someone who calls himself a Ghostwriter on TikTok. He did this not because he is a huge fan of the artists, but rather because he was unhappy with his salary as a lyricist in the music industry. “I was a ghostwriter for years and got paid almost no money while the big brands made a profit,” he wrote in one of his TikTok posts. “The future is here.”

Record company Universal Music Group, which represents both Drake and The Weeknd, removed the song from streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer. At that time, it had already been listened to over 600,000 times on Spotify. The original video has also been removed from TikTok and YouTube.

The song is about Selena Gomez, among others, having an affair with The Weeknd. According to FunX radio DJ Fernando Halman, this is already reason to doubt the authenticity. “It’s controversial in terms of content. You hear The Weeknd sing that his ex-girlfriend, Selena Gomez, cheated. And anyway, I don’t see a collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd happening quickly. Between the two.”

As for the sound, according to Hallman, it’s less clear that it’s a fake number. “It’s really well done. Only if you listen closely can you hear notes from Drake that you wouldn’t normally expect on a track like this. But the average person only hears Drake.”

The radio DJ, on the other hand, sees the joke of mimicking voices via artificial intelligence (AI), but also warns of the dark side. “Artists busy making music, with creative expression, are at risk. It gets annoying the moment you want to pat money on someone else’s back. I’ve been the voice of NPO Zapp for years. Imagine Zapp saying: We have your AI version. We press the button once.” one and we’re doing all the voiceovers. That can be hard for people who live off their voices.”

No matter how good it sounds, according to Hallman, artificial intelligence can never replace real music. “You can never imitate a human being’s creative expression. That’s a feeling, an emotion. That’s the magic of creativity. You can’t program ideas that just come along.”