Christopher Haworth, Associate Professor in Music at the University of Birmingham, discusses the moral, ontological and aesthetic issues that are stirred by the proliferation of so-called deepfakes in twenty-first century popular music. Typically viewed as a form of audio clickbait, cases such as ghostwriter’s fusion of Drake and The Weeknd prompt us to ask what happens when music produced by deepfakes is aesthetically and culturally valuable. How will the legal and moral issues of ‘voice theft’ be resolved if the results are in the public interest?
