This won’t be the first time that the entertainment industry has played with AI, but in Joel’s case, he became an unsuspecting victim prior to his nostalgia-heavy music video dropping. Merely days before Joel appeared on the Grammy stage, the Houston Fox-owned station played a song that was claimed to be Joel’s latest track. However, it turned out to be an AI-generated track that was trained on Joel’s voice, and the lyrics were also written by AI software. “Joel took 17 years to write that song and we took an hour,” said one of the podcasters behind the stunt. Joel has yet to comment on the drama that unfolded before his real song was officially released.
Last week @scharpling wrote lyrics for the new Billy Joel song live on The Best Show and we used a Billy Joel AI for the vocals and Fox 26 Houston was nice enough to cover it on the nightly news pic.twitter.com/zvTY6xBGCX
— The Best Show with Tom Scharpling (@bestshow4life) February 7, 2024
Joel’s music video is a look into the beautiful things that can come out of AI deployment, and all the perils that come with it. Disney recently revealed an AI tool called FRAN that can de-age or accelerate the aging effect on an actor’s face with uncanny accuracy and a natural feel to it. In the Marvel blockbuster “Captain America: Civil War,” we got a look at a de-aged Robert Downey Jr. with a clean-shaved wrinkle-free face. But the same behemoth that is Marvel also courted flak for using AI to create artwork for one of its TV shows at the cost of risking creative artists’ jobs.