Troye Sivan

Troye Sivan (born Troye Sivan Mellet, 1995, in Johannesburg and raised in Perth) built a YouTube audience of millions before pop stardom — “Blue Neighbourhood” (2015), “My My My!,” and the 2023 hit “Rush” — alongside acting turns in “Boy Erased” and “The Idol.” Few artists owe their career more directly to the platform that later asked to clone their voice.

From deepfake video to Dream Track

Sivan’s first brush with synthetic media came in 2021, when the video for “You,” his collaboration with Tate McRae, used deepfake technology to map their faces onto dancers; he told i-D at the time that the tech felt “kind of scary” and should be approached with caution. Two years later he crossed the line from subject to licensor: in November 2023 he joined Charli XCX, Sia, and six other artists in Dream Track, YouTube’s pilot powered by Google DeepMind’s Lyria model that let US creators generate 30-second songs in a participating artist’s AI-cloned voice for Shorts.

His statement at launch grounded the decision in a decade of trust: the platform that built his career had, in his view, earned the chance to experiment with his voice. The caution never disappeared — it just stopped being a reason to sit out. Like most of the Dream Track cohort, he framed participation as a way to watch the technology develop from the inside rather than read about it afterward.