Eminem released the track Fall of Putin. What do you think is wrong with this?

No, it’s not a bubble. Because this thing is changing entire industries very quickly and making people’s mouths drop open in amazement.

To once again emphasize the significance of these transformations in society, I will tell you a story about a kind of «little byte» — Lil Byte.

This story is about AI, rap, and Putin. So if the topic isn’t interesting, keep scrolling.

What kind of track is this?

It all started when, after the new year, some Ukrainians started posting «Eminem’s new music video» in their feeds, with the loud title FALL OF PUTIN: The DEATH of a DICTATOR.

The clip features vivid scenes where soldier Eminem sits in a trench, goes to a demonstration with Ukrainians, flies on a rocket, and of course asks his grandfather, who looks a bit like Putin.

The chorus of this song is as follows:

The song mentions Zelensky, Kyiv. The voice and the words themselves sound like real Eminem work from the time of The EMINEM Show.

In just over two weeks, the clip has garnered 421,000 views and almost 5,000 comments.

People from all over Ukraine are thanking Eminem for supporting Ukraine during the war. Most are sure that this song was sung by the real Slim Shady.

And only some advise in the comments to pay attention to the description on the YouTube channel. Of course, it does not belong to Eminem, but to a certain Lil Byte .

The song description states that this content is synthetically generated. YouTube requires creators to provide this notice if the content:

• shows a real person saying or doing something that didn’t actually happen;
• contains altered footage of a real event or location;
• realistically recreates a situation that did not actually happen.

And in the description of the channel itself, Lil Byte himself indicates that he creates parodies of Eminem’s songs.

Who is Lil Byte?

My attempts to contact Lil Byte ended in nothing. I had to scour the internet, reading the comments he left under the tracks.

And here’s what we found out.

Lil Byte launched his channel on February 9, 2022. He started with tracks that parody Eminem’s voice, but without a video yet, just the voice.

«EMINEM’s tracks are created by synthesizing his voice. Everything you hear in my music is written by me. I experiment with different artists from time to time,» the description said at the time.

In the comments, Lil Byte admits that he is a long-time fan of the rapper’s work. And he actually finds it very difficult to write lyrics the way Em did.

He spends a lot of time writing songs so that «the punches are strong and there’s some kind of wordplay in every line.»

The beat, the lyrics, and even the performance, as Lil Byte says, he did himself. He just changed the voice after the fact.

«It took me over 30 hours to get this vocal the way I wanted it. It really takes a long time,» the artist wrote about one of the tracks.

The first big event in Lil Byte’s career happened in 2022.

Shortly after a court ruled in favor of Hollywood superstar Johnny Depp in his defamation lawsuit against ex-wife Amber Heard, a diss track titled Eminem-Amber surfaced online and went viral.

Many believed that Eminem wrote the song. But he had nothing to do with it.

Eminem himself has never commented on Lil Byte’s work. But in 2024, he may have accidentally «followed his path.» Namely, he mocked Amber Heard in his new song Lucifer.

In fact, Lil Byte is not the first to use AI to make parody tracks on EMINEM. This has already been done, for example, by French DJ David Guetta, who demonstrated what he called Emin-AI-eM right at the concert. Guetta admitted that he planned to make such an insert as a joke, but it went down very well with the audience. He recalled how he found an AI program on the Internet and asked it to write a verse in the style of Eminem about the future of raves. Then he found another program that helped him voice this verse in a voice that sounded like The Slim Shady.

Conclusions

Okay, so now you know a lot about Eminem’s synthetic clones. Now I’ll tell you what the ultimate goal of this story was.

With this story, I wanted to highlight the impact that AI can already have on us. It’s about impact of different kinds.

The same song about Putin worked perfectly as counter-propaganda for the Russian regime. Perhaps Lil Byte did not have such an ultimate goal, he simply chose a hot topic. But more than 400,000 views in two weeks is a result that any counter-propaganda that is done purposefully, without AI, without an artificial Eminem, can barely achieve.

Programs that generate voice and text allow you to multiply the possibility of influencing society (both positive and negative). Of course, algorithms will not do all the work for you. Lil Byte himself emphasized that he spends a lot of effort and time on his tracks.

It’s like a social elevator for new performers (both influencers and propagandists). So we’re waiting for the revival of the work of already deceased idols. Such tracks will definitely appear (the main thing is that no one revives Kobzon).

Well, we’re waiting for clones of live performers. Maybe they’ll be even better than the original could record now.

Eminem himself didn’t dare to write anything about Putin’s death. Instead, an unknown clone did it. And he supported thousands of Ukrainians with his creativity.