Simon Willison’s Weblog

2nd October 2023

Weird A.I. Yankovic, a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning. Andy Baio reports back on his investigations into the world of AI voice cloning.

This is no longer a niche interest. There’s a Discord with 500,000 members sharing tips and tricks on cloning celebrity voices in order to make their own cover songs, often built with Google Colab using models distributed through Hugging Face.

Andy then makes his own, playing with the concept “What if every Weird Al song was the original, and every other artist was covering his songs instead?”

I particularly enjoyed Madonna’s cover of “Like A Surgeon”, Lady Gaga’s “Perform This Way” and Lorde’s “Foil”.