A masterclass in legal threats.
Down and Out
After being sent a very guilt-inducing cease-and-desist, Drake has taken down his AI-generated diss track that deepfaked the voices of Tupac and Snoop Dogg.
As The Verge reports, the Canadian-born rapper, née Aubrey Graham, has deleted the track “Taylor Made” from his profile on X-formerly-Twitter, though because it had been up for nearly a week, there are still tons of versions of it re-uploaded on YouTube and elsewhere.
Part of his ongoing beef with Kendrick Lamar, the diss track drew the attention of Tupac Shakur’s estate, and an attorney for the family sent Drake a strongly worded legal letter earlier in the week threatening in no uncertain terms to sue the hell out of him if he didn’t take it down.
“The Estate is deeply dismayed and disappointed by your unauthorized use of Tupac’s voice and personality,” Shakur family attorney Howard King wrote in a letter to Graham. “Not only is the record a flagrant violation of Tupac’s publicity and the estate’s legal rights, it is also a blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time.”
If he didn’t take it down, King said the Shakur estate would “pursue all legal remedies” to force him to do so — but it appears that the letter was enough to scare Drake straight.
Pot, Meet Kettle
As we noted in our first write-up of the debacle, “Taylor Made” was hypocritical on several levels. Not only has its namesake Taylor Swift herself been the victim of nonconsensual deepfakes, but Drake himself has spoken out about having his voice spoofed by AI without his approval.
“This is the final straw,” the Toronto rapper wrote in an Instagram story last year after someone used AI to make it sound like he was rapping the Ice Spice hit “Munch.”
His label, UniversalMusicGroup, also took major umbrage to another song that used AI to spoof his voice, and went so far as to threaten social networks and streaming platforms if they refused to remove it from their services.
Snoop, for his part, responded in the most Snoopian-way ever: by posting an incredulous Instagram video in which he asks viewers “what the f*ck” had happened.
Unfortunately, we’re likely to see a lot more of this kind of thing moving forward — but at least one of the people who was dragged into it against their will has a sense of humor about it.
More on deepfakes: Gym Teacher Arrested for Using AI to Make Principal Say Racist Things
