That viral Justin Bieber Diddy song is almost definitely AI
Scandal seekers are trying to pin Bieber to the arrested mogul
Photo: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic (Getty)
The details of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ sex trafficking and racketeering indictment are horrifying enough without needing any embellishment, but that hasn’t stopped scandal seekers from doing it anyway. Recently, a clip of a song attributed to Justin Beiber has gone viral on TikTok, with one video amassing over 7 million views. As of this writing, the audio clip has been used in 5500 videos and counting.
In light of the recent news, it’s clear why the song—which CBS News says first surfaced in April—has taken off so much. “Lost myself at a Diddy party/Didn’t know that’s how it goes/I was in it for a new Ferrari/But it cost me way more than my soul,” the Bieber sound-alike sings over a generic pop beat. If Bieber had actually written those lyrics, it would be pretty damning evidence that the young star was one of the many alleged victims of Diddy’s crimes.
Are these the real lyrics to Justin Bieber’s song? “Lost myself at a Diddy party” pic.twitter.com/Pjxj6wdB63
— NuclearTaco ™️🇺🇸 (@TacoforFive1) September 20, 2024
The thing is, it’s nearly certain that some rubbernecker with access to ChatGPT or some other AI generator created the song. There’s no record anywhere of Bieber releasing the song—which isn’t even a full song anyway—and it doesn’t appear in the catalog on his website or on any of his or his team’s social media. Although the vocals do sound like they exist vaguely in the same neighborhood as Bieber’s, it’s like comparing a peach to peach-flavored LaCroix; something about it is just clearly hollow and fake. If all of that—plus the fact that the lyrics are the exact type of smoking gun an internet detective would search for—isn’t enough, CBS also ran the clip through multiple AI audio detection tools, leading to “several” results indicating that the audio was most likely AI-generated.
People want to pin Bieber to Diddy because the pop star’s mentor, Usher, was himself mentored by Combs. There’s also photographic evidence of Bieber and Combs hanging out when the former was in his teens, including a recirculating video posted to Bieber’s YouTube account 2009 when he was 15 years old, titled “JUSTIN BIEBER’s 48 HRS with DIDDY!!” (“It’s definitely a 15-year-old’s dream… For the next 48 hours, he’s with me. We’re gonna go buck full crazy,” Combs says in the video.) The whole thing certainly seems more sinister considering what we know now, but if there is more to the story, fake songs, especially about a topic like this, won’t help anyone find justice.
Instead, let’s listen to the real Bieber, who is “aware of Diddy’s arrest and all the allegations,” but “it’s not anything that he wants to focus on,” according to a source close to the artist, via People. The source also added that Bieber has “been in a happy bubble since (his son) Jack was born” and “he just wants to focus on being a great dad and husband.”