Grimes

Grimes — the stage name of Claire Boucher (born 1988) — is a Canadian musician and producer whose self-made albums Visions and Art Angels made her one of the defining art-pop figures of the 2010s. Long fascinated by technology and futurism, she had sung about AI for years before the industry’s reckoning arrived.

Open-sourcing her own voice

In April 2023, days after the viral fake-Drake track “Heart on My Sleeve” panicked the music business, Grimes went the opposite direction: she tweeted an open offer to split 50% of royalties with anyone who made a successful AI song using her voice, adding that she liked the idea of “open sourcing all art and killing copyright.” Weeks later she shipped Elf.Tech, a free voice-cloning platform built with CreateSafe that lets creators record as GrimesAI and distribute the results.

The experiment made her the reference case for consensual voice licensing — an artist-controlled alternative to both unlicensed deepfakes and blanket prohibition, in the same spirit as Holly Herndon’s Holly+ project. Hundreds of GrimesAI tracks followed, and she has continued experimenting since, from AI-assisted stem separation to praising image generators as era-defining art projects.

Her enthusiasm is not uncritical. In 2024 posts she stressed fighting for “the specialness of humans,” said she had never heard a fully AI-generated song that was good on its own, and criticized slop-oriented AI music apps — a line consistent with her overall bet: artists should own and shape the technology rather than pretend it can be stopped.