Skip to main content

Eminem appears to diss Mark Zuckerberg in hilarious, A.I.-generated deepfake

Eminem Deepfake Song | Mark Zuckerberg Diss | MUSIC VIDEO

Over the years, Eminem has dissed everyone from Christina Aguilera and the Insane Clown Posse to Will Smith and his own mother, suggesting that few are safe from Marshall Mathers’ lyrical gut punches. But the target of his latest diss track is still somewhat surprising — and not just because his net worth dwarfs that of every single person Eminem has beefed with previously combines.

In a diss track dropped by surprise this month, Em throws out 2 minutes and 46 seconds of shots at Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Well, kind of.

In fact, the track — titled Eminem Deepfake Song — gives away its central conceit in its name. This is not the real Eminem, but rather a soundalike A.I. whose songwriting and performance abilities are the result of a text-generating algorithm and some impressive deepfake audio speech synthesis.

While it doesn’t sound flawless, it’s nonetheless a generally on-point track that sounds convincingly like the artist it’s modeled on. Even if lines like “You’re just a little big stupid internet clown” don’t quite have the career-ending knockout power of some of the top-selling rapper’s best lines.

“We inputted, ‘Mark Zuckerberg diss in the style of Eminem’ into the A.I. program Shortly Read, which uses GPT-3,” Eli Weiss, one half of the Calamity A.I. collective responsible for the project, told Digital Trends. “Within seconds, it wrote the lyrics. We sent those to 30 Hertz, another Youtuber, who uses Tacotron 2 to generate a synthesized voice that imitates Eminem. By feeding the program various real vocal snippets, he’s trained it to create vocals that imitate different rappers. Then 30 Hertz takes the resulting vocals and pairs them to a beat. The finished product is a song that was made with very little human artistry. It’s a combination of the computer juggling various roles of the song production process.”

Facebook blocked image
Eli Weiss

The unreal Slim Shady

Jacob Vaus, Weiss’ partner in deepfake crime, told Digital Trends: “We were blown away at how real the song sounds. The lyrics aren’t as good as Eminem’s, but the A.I was able to pick up on a lot of his common tropes. Things like quick, clever jokes, as well as some more offensive humor. Though the rhyme scheme was off, it got his writing down pretty well.”

Vaus pointed out that the text-generating algorithm — which Digital Trends has previously covered in-depth — was not given any additional information about Eminem or Zuckerberg in order to create its rhyme. “The song is sometimes general, but there are [some] specific lines that have knowledge about Zuckerberg — like how he owns Instagram, is a CEO, [and more],” he said.

The implications of demos like this are profound, not least for when someone does attempt to create a track or album that’s intended to be more than just a fun gimmick. Do rappers own their own voices and rhyme styles? Is GPT-3 the ghostwriter of the future? For now, we’re just happy to ponder the irony that Eminem, who once rhymed that “to rap like a computer … must be in my genes” is now having computers take a bite (byte?) out of his style. Will the real Slim Shady please stand up, indeed.

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Intel’s upcoming iGPU might destroy both Nvidia and Apple M2
A render of Intel's H-series mobile processors.

Intel Meteor Lake might not see the light of day on desktops (not anytime soon, at least), but it seems that the mobile chips are going strong.

According to inside sources, laptops equipped with Meteor Lake chips may not even need a discrete graphics card -- the integrated GPU is going to be powerful enough to rival Nvidia's GTX 1650. That's not all, though. It appears that Intel might even be able to compete against Apple's M2 chip, but in a different way.

Read more
Nvidia may launch 3 new GPUs, and they’re bad news for AMD
An Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card seen from the side.

In a surprising twist, Nvidia might be releasing not one, but three graphics cards. They all fall under the same RTX 4060 umbrella, although two of them are RTX 4060 Ti models.

This marks a strong entry into the midrange segment for Nvidia, with one of the cards addressing a significant concern -- low VRAM. Should AMD be worried about losing even more business to Team Green?

Read more
Air New Zealand reveals cost of its comfy sleep pods
Air New Zealand's Skynest sleep pods.

Air New Zealand has finally revealed the approximate cost of booking one of its economy-class sleeper pods on a long-haul flight: $400-$600 New Zealand dollars ($250-$380) -- plus the cost of your seat.

Passengers will only be allowed one pod session per flight, so you’ll have to remain crammed in coach for the rest of the time.

Read more