Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and more musicians demand protection against AI
Source: The Guardian
A group of more than 200 high-profile musicians have signed an open letter calling for protections against the predatory use of artificial intelligence that mimics human artists’ likenesses, voices and sound. The signatories span musical genres and eras, ranging from A-list stars such as Billie Eilish, J Balvin and Nicki Minaj to Rock and Roll Hall of Famers like Stevie Wonder and REM. The estates of Frank Sinatra and Bob Marley are also signatories.
The letter, which was issued by the Artist Rights Alliance advocacy group, makes the broad demand that technology companies pledge not to develop AI tools that undermine or replace human songwriters and artists.
“This assault on human creativity must be stopped. We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem,” the letter states.
The letter does not call for an outright ban on the use of AI in music or production, saying that responsible use of the technology could have benefits for the industry. Music producers have used artificial intelligence tools in a variety of ways in recent years, in one case employing AI to isolate John Lennon’s vocals from an old demo track and use them to create a “new” Beatles song which was released last year.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/02/musicians-demand-protection-against-ai
There's a particularly glaring recent example of why this pushback against AI is necessary:
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/suno-is-a-music-ai-company-aiming-to-generate-120-billion-per-year-newton-rex/
April 2, 2024
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Suno has emerged as one of the leading AI music generation companies. It charges a subscription fee to let users create full songs from a text prompt or other simple inputs, such as lyrics and style. In this way, it seems to be trying to become the Midjourney for music. Its lyrics generation is handled by OpenAI’s API, but the music and vocal generation is made possible by Suno’s AI models. The generated songs are often impressive, and some people are already reporting switching their listening habits from Spotify to Suno.
But there are hints that Suno, like many other generative AI companies, may train its models on copyrighted work without permission. Suno has not disclosed what it uses as training data. In a recent piece in Rolling Stone, one of Suno’s investors was reported as saying they didn’t have deals with the labels “when the company got started” (there is no suggestion this has changed), that they invested in the company “with the full knowledge that music labels and publishers could sue,” and that the founders’ lack of open hostility to the music industry “doesn’t mean we’re not going to get sued.” Taken together, these hints suggest there is a decent possibility Suno trains on copyrighted music without consent.
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I, and others, have found that Suno regularly outputs music that closely resembles copyrighted material. This is true across musical style, melodies, chord sequences, instrumental parts and lyrics. In this post, I will share some examples, and evaluate what they mean.
I want to stress that I don’t think this kind of output resemblance is required for copyright to have been infringed: I think that, if the model was trained on copyrighted work without a license, copyright has been infringed, whether the model generates exact copies of the training data or not. The examples I include in this post are rather intended to help point towards what the model may have been trained on.
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