How to Sing a Grimes Song

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Dao De Leonard is the co-founder and CEO of Create Safe. He says they've had around 300 songs distributed or are uploaded to the platform. And if any of them take off and make money, boom, Grimes gets a piece of that. So yeah, everything you just heard, that was AI Grimes. The real Grimes didn't have to do a thing. I mean, here, just listen to some of these songs. You got these in line, I mean, like me, other side inside. This created by an artist called keto. Dao told us that the real Grimes liked it so much that she's now going to add her voice to the song. Is

In Part 1 of this series, AI proved that it could use real research and real interviews to write an original script for an episode of Planet Money. Our next task was to teach the computer how to sound like us. How to read that script aloud like a Planet Money host.

On today's show, we explore the world of AI-generated voices, which have become so lifelike in recent years that they can credibly imitate specific people. To test the limits of the technology, we attempt to create our own synthetic voice by training a computer on recordings of former Planet Money host Robert Smith. Then we introduce synthetic Robert to his very human namesake.

There are a lot of ethical, and economic, questions raised by a technology that can duplicate anyone's voice. To help us make sense of it all, we seek the advice of an artist who has embraced AI voice clones: the musician Grimes.

This episode was produced by Emma Peaslee and Willa Rubin, with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Keith Romer and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Engineering by James Willetts. Jess Jiang is our acting executive producer.

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