Artificial intelligence is a new Goliath for Universal Music Group, the record label that manages superstars like Sting, The Weeknd, Nicki Minaj, and Ariana Grande.
In April, the music collective addressed urgent emails to streaming services like Spotify (SPOT) and Apple Music pleading with them to forbid AI systems from learning from the melodies and lyrics of their plagiarized songs.
The business has “a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent the unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators,” a Universal Music Group, or UMG, spokesperson told CNN. We anticipate that our platform partners will seek to prevent artists from being harmed by the use of their services.
The goal of UMG’s action, first reported by the Financial Times, is to prevent artificial intelligence from endangering the industry’s existence.
Artificial intelligence, and more especially AI music, is taught by listening to previously published compositions online or by being given a library of music by humans.
Related: Daft Punk Split Up In Part Due To Concerns About The Growth Of AI In Music
UMG claims that it is not opposed to technology in general but rather AI that is so sophisticated that it can instantly replicate melodies and even musicians’ voices. That might put UMG’s extensive collection of musical works and its very profitable artists at risk.
“UMG’s success has been, in part, due to embracing new technology and putting it to work for our artists,” the company said in a statement on Monday. “We have been doing this with our own innovation around AI for some time now.” The question of whose side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on is raised by the training of generative AI using the music of our artists.
The business claimed that AI that makes use of artists’ music breaches both UMG agreements and copyright laws. UMG has been requesting that streamers remove tracks that were created using artificial intelligence.
challenging to control
The Fowlkes Firm entertainment and business attorney Karl Fowlkes commented, “I understand the motivation behind the move, but I’m not sure how effective this will be as AI services will probably still be able to access the copyrighted material one way or another.”
There are no laws that specify what AI may and cannot train. But last month, the US Copyright Office published updated instructions on how to register literary, musical, and creative works created by AI in response to people wishing to request copyright for such works.
“In the case of works containing AI-generated material, the Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of’mechanical reproduction’ or instead of an author’s ‘own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form,'” the new advice states.
The guidance continued, based on how the AI tool functions and how it was used to create the final piece of work, the copyright will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
The US Copyright Office indicated that it will also be asking the public for feedback on how the office should handle those works and how the law should apply to copywritten works that the AI learns on.
“The copyright office and courts should specifically forbid corporations using copyrighted works to train their models to produce similar creations. According to Fowlkes, original art—as opposed to works produced by machines that copied the original art to produce new ones—is intended to be protected by law.
But specialists in AI say it’s not quite that easy.
You can mark your website as “not searchable. However, that is a request, thus you cannot stop it. Simply ask that they refrain from doing it, said Shelly Palmer, an advanced media professor at Syracuse University.
A robots.txt file, for instance, can be used by a website to restrict which URLs “search engine crawlers” can reach a specific site, according to Google. However, it is not a stop-all, stay-away choice.
In February, Grammy-winning DJ and producer David Guetta demonstrated how simple it is to make new music with AI. Guetta wrote a new song in 1 hour using Uberduck for voice and ChatGPT for lyrics.
The end product was a rap with a perfect replica of Eminem’s voice. Despite promising never to release the song commercially, he sang it at one of his gigs in February.
Guetta said to CNN last month, “What I think is very interesting about AI is that it’s raising the question of what is it to be an artist.”
Guetta is embracing AI rather than resisting it because he thinks it will have a huge impact on the music business. But he concedes that there are still uncertainties about copyright.
them seems absurd to me that today I can enter lines and they will seem like Drake is rapping them, or Eminem, so there is an ethical issue that needs to be addressed, he said.
And UMG specifically wants to prevent that. The musical collective compares artificial intelligence music to “deep fakes, fraud, and denying artists their due compensation.”
According to the UMG statement, “These incidents show why platforms have a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists.”
Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora, which also stream music, did not respond to requests for comment.
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