What Grimes Is Doing With AI, Explained

a comprehensive list of grimes ai songs, plus everything you need to know about what she's doing with ai and music
Brandon Gorrell

Grimes recently made her ‘voice’ publicly available1, effectively allowing anyone to use it to produce music, in exchange for a 50/50 revenue split of royalties on “any successful AI-generated song that uses [it].” Since she announced the offer, she’s retweeted several of these songs; today, she tweeted “I am actually kinda stressed that ppl r starting to make competitively (or maybe better??) quality grimes sounding songs than I do but it's also the most wonderfully poetic way to die and respawn in another career.”

Soon after Grimes made her offer on Twitter, the AI voice company Uberduck tweeted that they would host a competition in which the person who could create the best Grimes AI song — as judged by popular vote of a set of finalists chosen by the company — will win $10,000.

About a week after her announcement, Grimes published more details about her offer. In order to make a song with Grimes’ vocals, the producer must provide her team with an acapella recording of the lyrics, after which the producer will receive a WAV file of the lyrics in Grimes’ voice, which the producer will then own.

Below, check out the AI Grimes music that has come out so far.

Grimes AI Songs

There aren’t a ton of full tracks out yet, and they’re somewhat difficult to find, but so far, I’ve collected the best to be found here. Listen to them below.

"In Another Life (feat GrimesAI)" by Kotomi

“Ether” by Nick Webb

Webb says he got the lyrics from ChatGPT.

“Homo-Techno” by Deriler

“Take on Me (Cover)” by xlovur

“Dark Horizon” by Billy Clanton

“Astral” by Cage Eye

There are additionally several clips of unreleased songs circulating on Twitter. As the full versions get released, I’ll add them to the list above. For now, you can listen to the clips by clicking the links below.

  • Here’s a Grimes AI cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.”
  • @heartlocketx posted a clip of a track using Grimes’ voiceprint called “Lockscreen Baby Feat. Grimes” on April 24th, and says they’ll release the full track in May. Listen to it on Twitter.

Grimes’ announcement came on the heels of the release of the viral banger “Heart on my Sleeve,” a song produced by an anonymous TikTok user who goes by “Ghostwriter977,” who used AI trained on The Weeknd and Drake’s voices for the vocal track. Universal Music Group (UMG), the corporation that represents The Weeknd and Drake, had the song removed. (To listen to the song, and read a more in-depth account of what happened with UMG, read my coverage here.)

Where UMG moved to suppress user generated content (UGC) and thus reserve its property — The Weeknd and Drake — for top-down style deployment, Grimes has gone the opposite direction by making her voiceprint publicly available for anyone to use, thus leveraging UGC, while theoretically maintaining 50 percent ownership in any song that uses it.

-Brandon Gorrell

0 free articles left

Please sign-in to comment