Leaked Frank Ocean Music on Discord Was AI-Generated

Frank Ocean communities on the audio social platform Discord have discovered that the singer-songwriter’s ‘leaked’ tracks were a farce. Discord messages and forum posts reviewed by VICE website Motherboard, along with interviews with those scammed by the fake songs find that it was AI-generated, adding to the growing trend of music made by artificial intelligence.

“We determined just about everything he has is fake,” said Gamma, owner of a Discord server that focuses on rare Ocean recordings.

Motherboard says that the music was thought to be leaked songs from the recent Coachella headliner, which were available for sale on Discord and an online music collector’s market by a user reportedly named ‘mourningassasin.’ The fraudster offered Discord moderators and users Ocean’s ‘songs’ for upwards of $4,000 each, telling the publication that they made $13,000 CAD from the sales, also claiming that one of the songs was authentic.

The user explained to Motherboard that a musician was hired to create nine instrumentals that would include Ocean’s vocals, which were created with AI. Trained with high-quality snippets of Ocean’s voice, the AI-generated material was posted to the music collector’s forum, with users believing that the Grammy-winner’s unreleased tracks were leaked. Ocean himself told his Coachella crowd last month that new music would be released in the future, a collaboration and accompanying music video with Rosalía had recently surfaced on social media, titled “Changes.”

Despite threatened lawsuits from music companies like Universal Music Group, it appears that AI-created music is moving full steam ahead, with faux songs from Drake, The Weeknd, Michael Jackson, Kendrick Lamar, The Notorious B.I.G., and more becoming popularized in recent weeks.

Late last year, hacker Adrian Kwiatkowski was sentenced to 18 months in jail for making $148,000 from selling unreleased music by Ocean, Kanye West, Lil Uzi Vert, Post Malone and more, although it appears that material was genuine.