Musicians threaten to make Oasis 'Live Forever' with AI

Some things should remain dead

Comment This week witnessed the destructive potential of AI in action as someone thought it'd be a good idea to bring brainless Britpop bores Oasis back from the dead.

Chris Woodgates and Bobby Geraghty, formerly of Hastings-based Oasis wannabes Breezer, released "AISIS - The Lost Tapes / Vol.1" last Friday, which they describe as "an alternate reality concept album where the band's 95-97 line-up continued to write music, or perhaps all got together years later to write a record akin to the first three albums, and only now has the master DAT tape from that session surfaced."

Explaining the impetus for the project, they said: "We're bored of waiting for Oasis to reform, so we've got an AI modelled Liam Gallagher to step in and help out on some tunes that were written during lockdown 2021."

Basically what they did was write derivative and obnoxious janglepop and force-fed a poor computer Liam Gallagher's insipid drawl then made it sing over their tracks.

The result is fairly convincing, but we only made it a minute and a half in. See if you can fare any better.

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Talking more enthusiastically about AISIS to The Times, Woodgates said: "It was essentially a case of training an algorithm on hours and hours of Liam Gallagher a capella and the sounds of his voice so that it could start to model the tone, the cadence, [of] how Liam sounds. Anyone with a bit of time and commitment to it could do the same thing."

The album gained traction among the musically challenged in the following days, leading some to seek a review from the horse's mouth. One fan asked Gallagher if he had heard AISIS and he replied: "Not the album heard a tune it's better than all the other snizzle out there."

He then told someone else: "Mad as fuck I sound mega."

Liam's brother, Oasis guitarist and occasional singer Noel, was less chuffed, telling BBC Radio 2: "They can make it sound like Liam. They can't make it sound like me. I cannot be reproduced," though The Register would argue that a beginner could reproduce the quality of Noel's playing with a month or two of practice.

This isn't the only AI project to storm the music industry this week. A TikTok user under the name ghostwriter977 released a song called "Heart On My Sleeve" created with AI to sound like a collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd – two more artists Vulture Central has little time for. The track's reception was inexplicably positive, leading to millions of streams online.

However, while Liam believes AISIS sounds "mega," the position of Universal Music Group, which reps both Drake and The Weeknd, couldn't be more different.

The world's largest music company has been firing off emails to streaming services like iTunes and Spotify demanding that they block AI from scraping their copyrighted songs for material, according to the Financial Times.

A spokesperson told the paper: "We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent the unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators. We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists."

Almost as quickly as the track went viral, it was snuffed out by streaming platforms, including TikTok where it first took root. Drake himself said that an AI-generated cover of him rapping an Ice Spice song was "the last straw" in an Instagram post.

There is not yet a firm legal framework around AI music so the industry is treading new ground and coming down hard. Still, AISIS's Woodgates believes it won't go away and the business "will have to catch up."

"Liam Gallagher will be around forever now," he said. "We're not going to be the only ones to do this. I think there is a positive side to it."

Liam Gallagher forever? Stop the world – I want to get off. ®