‘Terrified me’: Winnipeg musician claims her voice was used by AI

A Manitoba musician is claiming AI has stolen her music which is being used to create songs that aren’t her own. Harrison Shin explains.

A Winnipeg musician says she woke up to a surprise on Thanksgiving, saying that her voice was on someone else’s track.

Jodi Lang, an artist that goes by Hexa Moon, said she is sure the track is generated by artificial intelligence. During an interview with CTV News, Lang played her song featuring her husband’s voice, Velvet Vice, right after Velvet Desire by Nymphox.

“I find that a lot of the similarities are between the track titles and the songs,” Lang said.

She claims Nymphox used some of her own made-up language from her book for their songs.

“My voice, singing a song I never wrote, and I never sang—it absolutely terrified me.”

CTV News reached out to Nymphox via email and received a response strongly denying the claim.

“All NYMPHOX tracks are fully generated through licensed platforms with full commercial rights. No real human voice was used, cloned, or replicated in any part of NYMPHOX work,” the email read in part.

David Gerhard, a computer science professor at the University of Manitoba, said while he cannot comment on this specific case, this is the risk that exists “now that we have these machines that can do this kind of work.

“The problem is that AI is so ubiquitous and so trivially easy to use to generate a piece of music that sounds like it was written by somebody else. It is difficult to constrain those kinds of behaviours.

“People then have to use legal means as opposed to technical means to do that.”

Lang said she filed complaints to a number of platforms, showing CTV News an email from Spotify. The email read the platform removed a track from Nymphox during the investigation period.

CTV News reached out to Spotify for comment but did not receive a response.

Lang said the incident was disappointing, but it won’t stop her from creating her content.

“Go out and be the best you can be.”