Young Guru Gets Vocal About Disproving of Timbaland AI Voice Ventures

Young Guru has revoked his support of Timbaland in the artificial intelligence-generated music field. Guru, legal name Gimel Keaton, responded to news of Timbaland starting a music venture where up-and-coming artists will recreate the voices of artists both deceased and alive using an AI voice filter.

While Keaton once supported Timbaland’s posthumous feature with The Notorious B.I.G. earlier this month, he disapproved of the producer’s new software.

“@Timbaland I love you my brother. You know I do. But this ain’t it!!! This is dangerous and at a basic level, it’s corny!! I will be on the side of the Luddites,” Keaton wrote in his Instagram Story. Keaton’s reference to the Luddites is a 19th century radical organization of English textile workers that dismantled textile machinery.

In a Forbes article published earlier this week, Timbaland explained that he’s working towards commercializing a software that supports AI-generated voices on new music. “It’s going to really be a new way of creating and a new way of generating money with less costs,” he told Forbes. “I’m already here. This is what I’m doing. I’m going to lead the way.”

This isn’t the first time Keaton showed his concerns about the risky use of AI in music. Earlier this year, he responded to a viral clip of a man using deepfake technology to replicate Kendrick Lamar’s voice in a freestyle.

"Of course my mind goes to the ethical and legal aspects of what can be done with programs like Tacotron 2,” he wrote on Instagram at the time. “You add that to the power of ChatGPT and you realize we are in a very groundbreaking but dangerous moment,” he added. “It’s not the tech, it’s the evil that men do with the tech. There are legal aspects because at this present moment you can’t copyright a voice.”