“Thank you, Adele, this is such a beautiful song,” read one glowing comment below the emotional YouTube tribute to murdered US activist Charlie Kirk. But the music is AI-generated, and bears little resemblance to the British icon’s sound.
Rapidly developing artificial intelligence tools can now create songs from simple text prompts, creating tributes or entire performances on demand by mimicking the voices of celebrity artists, often without their knowledge or consent.
This trend raises thorny copyright issues and highlights the erosion of shared reality as unwitting users are increasingly consuming content laced with disinformation enabled by artificial intelligence.
“Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk!” A voice over in a video shows the right-wing activist who was murdered last month.
Visuals of US President Donald Trump’s aide Kirk appear on screen, “Angels sing your name. Your story is written in the stars, a fire that will not dim.”
Similar AI tributes to stars like Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber on YouTube, with fabricated thumbnails of them in tears, have collectively garnered millions of views and thousands of comments from unsuspecting viewers thanking them for songs they never made.
In many cases, the voices don’t sound like the original cast, yet many scrollers still believe the fake AI content flooding the internet and engage with it.
Alex Mahadevan of the nonprofit media organization Poynter told AFP, “I worry that what made the Internet so cool in the beginning: really weird, creative people doing things they were interested in for fun is gone. It’s been replaced by AI slop created by grifters for the purpose of making money.”
“We are becoming passive consumers of ‘content’ rather than active, aware digital citizens.”
When AFP pointed out at least three fake tribute clips on YouTube, including one attributed to Adele, the video giant quickly removed them.
“We terminated these channels for violating our policies prohibiting spam and deceptive practices,” company spokesman Jack Malone told AFP.
YouTube’s policy requires creators to “disclose when they have created realistically modified or synthetic content, including using AI tools,” which is now widely accessible.
In many tribute videos, the disclosure was present but not prominently displayed, often hidden in the video description where it could be easily overlooked unless users clicked to expand the text.
The videos highlight a new digital reality in which AI music generators can turn ordinary users into virtual musicians, imitating famous artists and creating entire songs from simple text prompts.
One such generator, Suno, says on its website, “Create any song you can imagine.”
It gives users suggestions like “Make a jazz song about watering my plants” or “Make a chore song about quitting your job.”
When AFP entered a prompt requesting a song in the voice of a famous singer mourning the death of a celebrity activist, the tool generated two options within seconds: “The star gone too soon” and “Echoes of a flame.”
A new AI “band” called The Velvet Sundown has released albums and has over 200,000 listeners on a verified Spotify account. On social media, the “band” calls itself: “Not quite human. Not quite machine.”
This trend has raised questions about whether tonal and visual similarity should be protected by copyright.
Mahadevan said, “I absolutely think that someone’s likeness should be protected from replication in AI tools. This also applies to dead people.”
Lucas Hansen, co-founder of the nonprofit CivAI, said it is unlikely that similarity generation will be banned entirely, but hopes for legal restrictions on its commercialization.
“There may also be restrictions on distribution, but current laws are much less strict against non-monetized content,” Hansen told AFP.
In June, the Recording Industry Association of America said major record companies sued two music generators, including Listen, over alleged copyright infringement.
Last year, more than 200 artists, including Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj, wrote in an open letter to AI developers and tech platforms that training tools on existing songs would “dilute the value of our work and prevent us from being fairly compensated.”
“This attack on human creativity must stop,” the letter said.
“We must defend against the predatory use of AI to steal the voices and likenesses of professional artists, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem.”
published – October 17, 2025 11:24 am IST