Drake’s beef with Kendrick Lamar isn’t nearly as important as his tiff with Tupac Shakur’s estate over using the dead rapper’s voice

Canadian rap artist Drake was forced to pull a diss track he had produced that used an AI-generated voice of Tupac Shakur. Prince Williams/Wireimage via Getty Images by Jabari M. Evans, University of South Carolina In April 2023, a song titled “Heart on My Sleeve,” written and produced by a mysterious producer named Ghostwriter, went viral on TikTok and briefly became the most popular song on both YouTube and Spotify. But just as quickly as “Heart on My Sleeve” took off, Spotify and YouTube removed it from their libraries. The producer and songwriter had used artificial intelligence to create vocals on the track that sounded like Drake and The Weeknd. Universal Music Group, which represents both artists, had threatened legal action. Though Drake was surely aware of the kerfuffle, he didn’t seem fazed by it. In fact, just over a year later, he was the one incorporating AI-generated vocals into his music during his ongoing feud with rapper Kendrick Lamar. I’ve been closely following these developments – which strike at the heart of technology, music and the law – both as a scholar of digital media and as a rap artist who was among the first to interpolate rap lyrics...