Artists
Artists and AI, in their own record
A two-sided briefing of named public statements — not a poll, and not a ranking. Tennessee’s ELVIS Act is one state answer to unauthorized voice and likeness. It does not settle every training, licensing, or tool-design fight these artists are talking about.
Pushing back
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April 2024
Artist Rights Alliance letter
More than 200 artists signed an Artist Rights Alliance open letter asking AI companies to stop devaluing music: no training on artists’ work without permission, and no flooding the market with soundalikes that dilute royalties. Coverage named Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder, Robert Smith, Katy Perry, and estates including Frank Sinatra among the signatories.
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April 2023
Drake, after the viral clone
When an unofficial track used AI approximations of Drake and the Weeknd (“Heart on My Sleeve”), BBC reported Drake’s Instagram reaction as “This is the final straw AI.” Universal Music Group and the Human Artistry Campaign used the same episode to argue that unauthorized clones and unlicensed training are a rights problem, not a novelty.
Licensing & experiment
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April 2023 · later Elf.Tech
Grimes
Grimes offered to split royalties 50/50 on successful AI songs that used her voice, and was widely quoted saying people could use that voice “without penalty” if the split was honored. She later released Elf.Tech, software that mimics her voice, with a reported 50/50 master-royalty split on songs that use it. That is a consent-forward license, not an open scrape of her catalog.
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Holly+
Holly Herndon
Herndon trained a model of her own voice (Holly+) and invited other people to perform through it. Coverage of Grimes’s later tool pointed back to that experiment: an artist-owned voice model, often described in communal or 50-50 terms, rather than a ban on every synthetic vocal. The through-line is permission and a share, not “take the voice.”
A spectrum, not a binary
Many of the “for” positions above are consent-and-compensation offers. The April 2024 letter signatories opposed predatory training and unauthorized clones — not every AI tool in a studio. The ELVIS Act is one enacted state response to identifiable voice and image used without authorization. How Tennessee courts will read that text in particular cases is still developing.