Bad Bunny Is Pissed About Viral AI Song Trained On His Voice

Rodrigo Varela/Getty Images

Bad Bunny Is Pissed About Viral AI Song Trained On His Voice

Rodrigo Varela/Getty Images

A few weeks ago, Bad Bunny released his new album Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana. It has 22 tracks, and it’s 81 minutes long. With that in mind, it’s hard to know why anyone would need more Bad Bunny songs right now, let alone a fake Bad Bunny song. But some people evidently feel like they do need such a track, and it’s recently gone viral on TikTok. Bad Bunny is not happy about it.

The trend of unauthorized AI-impersonation songs has been going on all year. At this point, you can Google any combination of popular artist and popular song and hear a fake AI karaoke rendition. It’s happening with new songs, too, and some of those songs are achieving a measure of popularity. This past spring, “Heart On My Sleeve,” a fake Drake/Weeknd collab from a TikTok user called Ghostwriter977 was removed from streaming services. Something similar seems to be happening with this fake Bad Bunny song.

The track in question, known as “Demo 5 Nostalgia” and posted by the anonymous FlowGPT, has been going around online for about a month. It’s a replacement-level reggaeton song that also features the fake vocals of Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber. (The Bieber bot sings in Spanish.) As Remezcla points out, people have been posting videos of themselves dancing to the song on social media. The Spanish pop star Bad Gyal, who’s namechecked during the fake Bad Bunny verse, posted and then deleted one such video.

Earlier this week, Bad Bunny wrote about the song on his WhatsApp channel. As Remezcla point out, Benito wrote, “if you guys like that shitty song that is viral on tiktok, get out of this group right now. You don’t deserve to be my friends and that’s why I made the new album, to get rid of people like that. So chu chu chu out.” (The “chu chu chu” is a reference to the fake song’s lyrics.

Bad Bunny’s anger could have a bit of a Streisand effect, since it’ll probably alert more people to the existence of this fake song. But that’s the kind of catch-22 that stars are in when AI deepfakes start to circulate, and nobody’s really come up with an effective answer yet.

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