Deepfake Drake + HatGPT + Ben Smith on the End of the BuzzFeed Era
A song featuring A.I.-generated versions of Drake and the Weeknd went viral — before being taken down by streaming services. Is censorship of A.I.-generated songs the way forward? Or can singers benefit from synthetic voices, as some artists like Grimes are suggesting? Then, HatGPT: Kevin and Casey pull headlines out of a hat and generate their own takes on the news. And Ben Smith, the former BuzzFeed News editor, discusses the end of the 2010s digital media era.
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Show Notes
A song featuring A.I.-generated versions of Drake and the Weeknd went viral — before being taken down by streaming services. Is censorship of A.I.-generated songs the way forward? Or can singers benefit from synthetic voices, as some artists like Grimes are suggesting?
Then, HatGPT: Kevin and Casey pull headlines out of a hat and generate their own takes on the news.
And Ben Smith, the former BuzzFeed News editor, discusses the end of the 2010s digital media era.
On today’s episode:
- Ben Smith is a journalist and co-founder of the digital media company Semafor. He was a New York Times media columnist and the first editor in chief of BuzzFeed News.
Additional reading:
- An A.I.-generated song made to sound like Drake and the Weeknd went viral before being taken down by streaming services.
- Grimes invited fans to make songs using A.I.-generated versions of her voice.
- Snapchat saw a spike in one-star reviews after users criticized its “My AI” feature.
- Taylor Swift did not invest in FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange company.
- Researchers turned a goldfish into a cyborg.
- The Republican National Committee released an A.I.-generated ad slamming President Biden.
- The U.K. blocked Microsoft’s $69 billion bid for the video game company Activision.
- Ben Smith’s book, “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral,” is an origin story of digital media.
- A BuzzFeed article set off a viral debate on the color of a dress.
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