Three days after Charlie Kirk was publicly slain, a video appeared on YouTube announcing the\u00a0 debut of singer-songwriter Adele\u2019s latest single, a soaring tribute to the conservative activist\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cRest in peace, Charlie Kirk!\u201d a voice that sounded somewhat like Adele\u2019s sang out over a\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0showing Kirk with his young daughter. \u201cThe angels sing your name. Your story\u2019s written in the stars, a fire that won\u2019t wane.\u201d<\/p>\n According to YouTube posts, the celebrity tributes were plentiful. They came from Ed Sheeran, Eminem, Taylor Swift, Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Post Malone, Dax, Lil Wayne, Jelly Roll, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber and Imagine Dragons.<\/p>\n But none of them were real. They were all generated using artificial intelligence. And they often featured fake thumbnail images that showed the artists in tears or with mournful expressions.<\/p>\n PolitiFact analyzed 24 YouTube videos claiming to show tribute songs dedicated to Kirk. Combined, these videos gained more than 4.6\u00a0million views, and some were shared to other platforms.<\/p>\n Two tribute songs to Charlie Kirk were attributed to Ed Sheeran. But they were made with AI. (Screenshot\/YouTube)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One was uploaded on the day of Kirk\u2019s assassination, illustrating the speed with which creators can generate songs related to a major event.<\/p>\n Nearly all the videos contained disclaimers saying they contained altered or synthetic content, yet many viewers left comments that show they believed these songs were real.<\/p>\n \u201cThank you, Justin,\u201d wrote a commenter who thought she was responding to Bieber.<\/p>\n \u201cDid not expect this from Bieber,\u201d wrote another.<\/p>\n Comments on a YouTube video titled \u201cJustin Bieber \u2013 You\u2019ll Be Missed Charlie Kirk (A Tribute To Charlie Kirk).\u201d The song was made with AI. (Screenshot\/YouTube)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The musical tributes sound like they might have taken a full band a week in a studio, said Bryan Pardo, Northwestern University computer science professor and head of the Interactive Audio Lab. That\u2019s part of why people believe them.<\/p>\n \u201cMost people don\u2019t realize how far AI-generated content has come,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Experts said AI tools can passably mimic artists\u2019 voices, especially when a listener hasn\u2019t spent a long time listening to these artists. But there are ways to identify sonic abnormalities typical of AI use.<\/p>\n AI music generators such as Suno and Udio are trained using a vast set of existing songs. With a short user prompt, they create new music quickly and inexpensively.<\/p>\n PolitiFact tested it.<\/p>\n \u201cMake a song about grieving the sudden death of an inspirational figure in politics, in the style of Taylor Swift,\u201d we wrote in prompts for Suno and Udio\u2019s free accounts. The tools rejected the prompts on grounds they don\u2019t have permission to generate an artist\u2019s likeness.<\/p>\n We tried again using more generic language: \u201cMake a song about grieving the sudden death of an inspirational figure in politics, in the style of a 35-year-old pop singer with a young, primarily female demographic.\u201d<\/p>\n Both tools produced songs within moments \u2014 two different songs per prompt.<\/p>\n (Screenshot\/Udio)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This does not make musicians happy. Major music companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records, through the Recording Industry Association of America,\u00a0sued<\/a>\u00a0both AI platforms in June 2024, accusing them of using copyrighted music to train their AI tools.<\/p>\n Suno said in a court filing that the model was trained using \u201ctens of millions of recordings,\u201d but argued the process constitutes fair use.<\/p>\n Artists including Imagine Dragons, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj and Stevie Wonder\u00a0argued in a 2024 letter that<\/a>\u00a0training AI bots on artists\u2019 work \u201cwill degrade the value of our work and prevent us from being fairly compensated for it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists\u2019 voices and likenesses, violate creators\u2019 rights, and destroy the music ecosystem,\u201d the letter read.<\/p>\n Those tools use technology similar to the kind used by ChatGPT, said Tom Collins, University of Miami associate professor of music engineering technology. Such models are trained on massive datasets with the aim of producing human-like language.<\/p>\n Some\u00a0AI<\/a>\u00a0artists<\/a>\u00a0have gained a following, and at least one AI artist has\u00a0secured a record deal<\/a>.<\/p>\n Through video comments like those on the tribute songs, fans sometimes show they don\u2019t realize they\u2019re listening to AI-created music.<\/p>\n \u201cThese models are definitely at the stage where, if you don\u2019t know an artist\u2019s lyrical capabilities, or the quality of their singing voice, based on, you know, several hours of listening earlier in your life or recently in your life, I think you can be fooled relatively easily,\u201d Collins said.<\/p>\n So what are some cues people can listen for?<\/p>\n Siwei Lyu, University at Buffalo computer science and engineering professor, said that playing the music on loop for a few rounds can reveal some abnormalities. The vocals, for example, may sound \u201coverly smooth or robotic,\u201d contain unusual breathing patterns, have smeared consonants or unrealistically regular vibrato, he said. Lyu analyzed the songs without AI disclaimers and found synthetic elements in the audio, including sudden changes in vocal quality and clarity.<\/p>\n For example, one Kirk tribute\u00a0song<\/a>\u00a0falsely attributed to Dax and Lil Wayne starts out with a low vocal quality, before shifting to a louder and clearer sound, Lyu said. He also detected voice clarity changes at the 0:46 and 0:56 timestamps.<\/p>\n Lyu and Collins each said that vocal and instrumentation mixing may not be as crisp as in a real track\u2019s studio version.<\/p>\n Collins compared the creation of AI music with image generation: \u201cIf you\u2019ve generated an image of a person, maybe that person has six fingers, or has, like, two fingers that are kind of melted together. That kind of melting, or that muddiness, the audio equivalent of that are like individual notes that don\u2019t really appear to be a guitar note or a piano note but something in between.\u201d<\/p>\n AI-generated lyrics are often generic and may have abrupt changes in quality, Lyu said. The rhyme schemes may be too regular, the language might be clich\u00e9, and the music may also lack the emotional nuance typically found in real performances,.<\/p>\n Collins said that AI-generated lyrics are typically formulaic and simplistic as they aim to fulfill the prompt\u2019s directions. A prompt about mourning might produce lyrics that contain the words \u201ccandles\u201d and \u201cheaven.\u201d<\/p>\n GPTZero analysis found a 98% chance that lyrics of one tribute duet supposedly made by Adele and Ed Sheeran were AI-generated. (Screenshot\/GPTZero)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Collins said he expects these tools to become more sophisticated, producing music that is less easily identifiable as AI. \u201cIf we go forward another couple of years, I could imagine that the approximation, that the mimicry, would be far better, and it would be harder, even for me, to tell,\u201d Collins said.<\/p>\n YouTube\u2019s policy as of\u00a02023<\/a>\u00a0requires creators to \u201cdisclose when they\u2019ve created altered or synthetic content that is realistic, including using AI tools.\u201d If creators don\u2019t disclose that information, they could have their content removed, be suspended from the YouTube Partner Program, or face other penalties.<\/p>\n In many of the tribute songs, that disclosure is not prominently displayed; it is buried under the video\u2019s description that won\u2019t be seen on desktop unless the viewer clicks \u201cmore.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a responsibility on streaming platforms that they\u2019re not really fulfilling about verification,\u201d Collins said.<\/p>\n PolitiFact staff researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.<\/p>\n This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact<\/a>, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.poynter.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three days after Charlie Kirk was publicly slain, a video appeared on YouTube announcing the\u00a0 debut of singer-songwriter Adele\u2019s latest single, a soaring tribute to the conservative activist\u2019s legacy. \u201cRest in peace, Charlie Kirk!\u201d a voice that sounded somewhat like Adele\u2019s sang out over a\u00a0video\u00a0showing Kirk with his young daughter. \u201cThe angels sing your name. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2118399,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[30218,340116,316964,402036,390577],"class_list":["post-2118398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-ai","tag-charlie-kirk","tag-generative-ai","tag-politifact","tag-sora"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/People-used-AI-to-make-dozens-of-fake-celebrity-tributes.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2118398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2118398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2118398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2118400,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2118398\/revisions\/2118400"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2118399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2118398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2118398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2118398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.poynter.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Ed_Sheeran_Charlie_Kirk_tribute_song_thumbnails_10-01-2025.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.poynter.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Comments_on_Justin_Bieber_Charlie_Kirk_tribute_song_10-01-2025.png\")
<\/p>\nTools can generate songs quickly based on simple prompts, even ones similar to an artist\u2019s style<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.poynter.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Screenshot_of_Udio_Taylor_Swift_prompt_10-01-2025.png\")
<\/p>\nVocals, lyrics and instrumentation can reveal generative AI clues<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.poynter.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/GPTZero_analysis_screenshot_10-01-2025.png\")
<\/p>\n