THE LATE country music legend Johnny Cash has come alive again thanks to artificial intelligence – but the song he’s “singing” has baffled fans.
YouTube channel “There I Ruined It” shared a clip of Cash, who died in 2003, “singing” smash hit “Barbie Girl”.
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With the help of artifical intelligence, fans now know how the country crooner would sing “Come on Barbie, let’s go party”.
The creator of the video said: “I first record the vocals myself so that I can do my best imitation of the cadence of the original singer.”
From there, he inputs the audio to AI and lets it work magic.
At the end of the AI-rendered cover, Johnny said: “This is what you call music? Well, I’ll be damned.”
But the song cover has left fans bamboozled, as they can’t distinguish between the AI and Johnny’s actual voice.
One fan said: “As a Cash fan, this is blasphemous. But as a fan of the absurd, this is perfect.”
Another said: “I like the fact that’s there’s effort to make it sound like that the artist actually sang it, along with the mannerisms.
“That “hello, I’m not Johnny Cash” sold it for me.”
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A country music fan said: “This is just insane. He could sing everything now and would sound better than most originals!”
The odd cover comes as another country music fan said she fears being “grounded here forever” if AI recreates her voice after death.
Dolly Parton said: “I don’t want AI. The only intelligence I have is artificial. Everything I have is artificial.
“I’ve left a great body of work behind and I don’t know at this moment in time how they’d manage to keep me around.”
And later this year, a “new” Beatles song will be released using AI for John Lennon’s voice, Paul McCartney revealed.
The music legend explained that AI technology had been used to “extricate” Lennon’s voice from a “ropey” old demo so that the song could be completed.
Earlier this year, the UK government this week announced that it is planning to scrap the introduction of a copyright exception for text and mining purposes – which includes AI.
Jamie Njoku-Goodwin, chief executive of UK Music, an industry body representing artists and record labels, said the law would have “paved the way for music laundering” and exposed creators and rights holders to exploitation.
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