Technology has advanced so much that even real fans can’t tell fakes from real ones. Fans of Frank Ocean have been waiting for new songs from him for so long that they fell for the trick.
The scammer got rich by selling fake songs created by artificial intelligence by American R&B artist Frank Ocean. Details of the story were known to Motherboard.
Discord user mourninggassasin created nine compositions using his AI model, in which Frank Ocean’s voice loaded “extremely high quality vocal tracks”. In early April, he posted a piece of one of the fakes on a music forum and realized that it was very popular.
“I immediately realized that everyone was starting to believe it,” Mourngassasin told reporters.
According to the scammer, soon after, several people contacted them about the clip, including two buyers who wanted to buy Frank Ocean’s music for a lot of money. Mourningassasin decided not to miss this opportunity and stated that he had other parts for sale. He earned about $10,000 from this.
There are many music experts on the Internet who are willing to buy supposedly “leaked” or unreleased songs by famous artists. Among them are many fans of Frank Ocean, who has not released a full album since Blond in 2016. The founder of a Discord fan club that collects rare recordings of the artist under the pseudonym Gamma said that mourningassasin offered them several songs in April for $3,000-4,000 each.
“The price is high, but not too high for Frank Ocean,” Gamma said. “We have determined that almost everything he owns is fake. This has seriously damaged the credibility of our server and will lead to distrust in these communities against any new and unverified seller.”
In a forum post, mourningassasin posted a link to Gamma Collector’s Discord, encouraging people to purchase a batch of Frank Ocean pieces. The scammer also released a song called “The Line,” which the AI claims was produced at Motherboard’s request. The Soundcloud service has removed this and a few other pieces that were explicitly created by artificial intelligence.
Recently, AI technology has advanced so much that even avid fans cannot distinguish a real piece from a created piece. In fact, there is no reliable way to confirm or deny the authenticity of the work, other than interpretation by the artist himself, Frank Ocean has yet to respond to a media request.
In 2019, Frank Ocean’s song “Blonde” topped the list of the 200 greatest music albums of the decade. The artist was even recognized as the voice of a generation.
Last year, a hacker reportedly broke into Ed Sheeran and sold his unreleased songs online. According to law enforcement, Adrian Kwiatkowski, alias Spirdark, earned around $148,000 from stolen tracks.
Source: Focus
Ashley Fitzgerald is an accomplished journalist in the field of technology. She currently works as a writer at 24 news breaker. With a deep understanding of the latest technology developments, Ashley’s writing provides readers with insightful analysis and unique perspectives on the industry.