John Legend

John Legend (born John Roger Stephens, 1978) is the singer-songwriter behind “All of Me” and “Ordinary People,” a longtime coach on The Voice, and in 2018 became the first Black man to complete the EGOT — an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. Few mainstream artists have put their own voice into AI systems as literally as he has.

Lending his voice to the machines

Legend’s AI collaborations started early: in April 2019 Google shipped a limited-time John Legend “cameo voice” for Google Assistant, built with DeepMind’s WaveNet text-to-speech so the model could answer everyday queries in his voice from a relatively short recording session. In November 2023 he went further, becoming one of nine artists — alongside Charlie Puth, Sia, and T-Pain — who licensed AI clones of their singing voices to Dream Track, YouTube’s experiment powered by Google DeepMind’s Lyria model that let creators generate 30-second songs in a chosen artist’s voice for Shorts.

His embrace comes with conditions. Speaking at the TIME100 Summit in April 2023 — days after an anonymous AI-generated “Drake and The Weeknd” track went viral — Legend said there “needs to be some regulation when it comes to how this works,” and voiced hope that regulators would “catch up with the technology” to protect artists’ intellectual property and likeness rights. His position is consistent: consented, licensed voice AI is an opportunity; unconsented cloning is theft. In 2024 he continued engaging with the debate, appearing at the UN’s AI for Good summit to discuss AI and music.