“Thank you, Adele, it’s such a beautiful song,” reads a glowing comment beneath an emotional YouTube tribute to slain US activist Charlie Kirk. But the music is AI-generated and bears little resemblance to the British icon’s voice.
Rapidly evolving artificial intelligence tools can now create songs from simple text prompts, mimicking the voices of celebrity artists to produce tributes or entire performances on demand, often without their knowledge or consent.
The trend raises thorny copyright issues and highlights the erosion of shared reality as unwitting users increasingly consume content infused with disinformation enabled by artificial intelligence.
“Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk!” sings a voice over a video showing the right-wing activist, who was assassinated last month.
“The angels sing your name. Your story’s written in the stars, a fire that won’t wane,” the voice intones as visuals appear onscreen of Kirk, an ally of President Donald Trump.
Similar AI tributes on YouTube attributed to stars such as Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber—complete with fabricated thumbnails of them in tears—collectively racked up millions of views and thousands of comments from unsuspecting viewers thanking them for songs they never made.
In many cases, the voices sound little like the original artists, yet many scrollers still believe fake AI content that is flooding the internet and engage with it.
“I’m concerned that what made the internet so cool to begin with—really weird, creative people doing things they’re passionate about for fun, is gone. It’s been replaced by AI slop created by grifters aiming to make money,” Alex Mahadevan, from the nonprofit media institute Poynter, told AFP.
“We’re becoming passive consumers of ‘content’ and not active, conscious digital citizens.”
After AFP pointed out at least three fake tribute clips—including the one attributed to Adele—to YouTube, the video giant promptly took them down.
“We terminated these channels for violating our policies prohibiting spam and deceptive practices,” company spokesman Jack Malon told AFP.
YouTube’s policy requires creators to “disclose when they’ve created altered or synthetic content that is realistic, including using AI tools,” which are now widely accessible.
In many of the tribute videos, the disclosure was present but not prominently displayed, often buried in the video description where it can be easily overlooked unless users click to expand the text.
The videos highlight a new digital reality in which AI music generators can turn ordinary users into virtual musicians, mimicking famous artists and creating entire songs from simple text prompts.
