Scammer made thousands of dollars selling Frank Ocean AI-generated tracks

A scammer has managed to trick listeners and sell multiple AI-generated Frank Ocean tracks for thousands of dollars.

Two songs, “The Line,” and “Steer It”, were reportedly AI-generated and sold as “leaked” tracks to a community of underground music collectors, according to Motherboard.

The scammer, who goes by the username “Mourningassasin” on the instant messaging social platform Discord, was able to secure about $9,700 (£7,000) from selling the fake recordings.

The Independent has contacted Ocean’s representatives for comment.

“We determined just about everything he has is fake,” Gamma, the owner of a Discord server devoted to Ocean’s recordings, wrote in a server-wide announcement this month.

Last month, Mourningassasin reportedly told Motherboard that they hired a musician to create nine fake Ocean tracks using “high quality vocal snippets” of the singer’s voice.

The scammer then posted a short snippet of one of these fake tracks and leaked it to a music forum.

“Instantly, I noticed everyone started to believe it,” Mourningassasin told Motherboard in an online chat, according to a report by Vice.

This isn’t the first instance where AI-generated tracks have caused chaos in the music community.

Last month, two new AI-generated Drake songs appeared on YouTube and TikTok after the 36-year-old Canadian rapper hit out at a cover of him rapping to Ice Spice’s “Munch”, which is believed to have been created by AI.

Before that, another AI-generated Drake track titled “Heart on My Sleeve,” featuring The Weeknd appeared on all streaming platforms.

The song received more than 275,000 plays on YouTube and was played more than 600,000 times on Spotify before it was taken down.