Hard Fork: Deepfake Drake + HatGPT + Ben Smith on the End of the BuzzFeed Era

A song featuring A.I.-generated versions of Drake and the Weeknd went viral — before being taken down by streaming services. Is censorship of A.I.-generated songs the way forward? Or can singers benefit from synthetic voices, as some artists like Grimes are suggesting?

Then, HatGPT: Kevin and Casey pull headlines out of a hat and generate their own takes on the news.

And Ben Smith, the former BuzzFeed News editor, discusses the end of the 2010s digital media era.

On today’s episode:

Ben Smith is a journalist and co-founder of the digital media company Semafor. He was a New York Times media columnist and the first editor in chief of BuzzFeed News.

Additional reading:

An A.I.-generated song made to sound like Drake and the Weeknd went viral before being taken down by streaming services.Grimes invited fans to make songs using A.I.-generated versions of her voice.Snapchat saw a spike in one-star reviews after users criticized its “My AI” feature.Taylor Swift did not invest in FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange company.Researchers turned a goldfish into a cyborg.The Republican National Committee released an A.I.-generated ad slamming President Biden.The U.K. blocked Microsoft’s $69 billion bid for the video game company Activision.Ben Smith’s book, “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral,” is an origin story of digital media.A BuzzFeed article set off a viral debate on the color of a dress.