Eminem Used AI to Voice Slim Shady and Depict His Image for 'The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce)'

Eminem‘s The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce) has been topping the charts lately and garnering a lot of attention from fans and critics alike. The album marked the return and end of Slim Shady as Eminem says a farewell to his alter ego with this album.

While that is the case, Slim Shady makes a return and seemingly appears alongside Marshall Mathers in the latest album cut visual for “Houdini.” The video sees a young Slim Shady travel back in time to the present day as he goes back and forth with Eminem. Eminem’s intro to the rap is taken from the popular “Without Me Part 2” as when raps “Guess who’s back, back again?/Shady’s back, tell a friend,” to kick things off. For fans wondering how Slim Shady was able to make a return in both voice and image, Billboard‘s Damien Scott revealed that he used AI to accomplish the feat.

Enlisting the company Metaphysic to make it happen, the Scott shares that Metaphysic “offers a suite of tools that allows artists to create and manage digital versions of themselves that they can then manipulate and use for their own projects or license out to third parties for movies, tv shows, or other commercial projects.” In terms of the ongoing concern of AI reducing the authenticity and originality of composition and mixing, Scott says that artists “protect [their] image and likeness against the pending artificial intelligence onslaught” by registering “with Metaphysic to build a database of [their] face, voice, and performance videos from any point in [their] career.” Through self-licensing deals, Metaphysic offers the ability for artists to control their own AI usage. Watch the video above.