Universal Music Asks Streaming Services To Block AI Access To Its Songs (variety.com) 84
The world's largest music company, Universal Music Group, is asking major streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music to block artificial intelligence companies from using its music to "train" their technology, according to a recent report in Financial Times. Variety reports: Confirming the report, a UMG spokesperson told the FT: "We have 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. We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists." The process involves the AI companies uploading copyrighted music from the platforms into their technology and thus enabling the bots to digest the lyrics and music and then essentially create songs or melodies in those styles. [...]
UMG has been sending takedown requests to the streamers "left and right," FT quoted an unnamed source as saying. "We have become aware that certain AI systems might have been trained on copyrighted content without obtaining the required consents from, or paying compensation to, the rightsholders who own or produce the content," the company said in an email from last month, according to the report. "We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists." The website drayk.it delivered users a custom Drake song, although it has since been shut down.
UMG has been sending takedown requests to the streamers "left and right," FT quoted an unnamed source as saying. "We have become aware that certain AI systems might have been trained on copyrighted content without obtaining the required consents from, or paying compensation to, the rightsholders who own or produce the content," the company said in an email from last month, according to the report. "We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists." The website drayk.it delivered users a custom Drake song, although it has since been shut down.
Losing battle (Score:5, Insightful)
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what they're going to do -- displace a lot of creative talent.
That's just not going to happen. I can't believe I still need to point this out, but there is no creativity there. None at all. The very idea is absurd on its face.
There are plenty of real things to worry about. Don't waste your energy on silly nonsense like this.
Re: Losing battle (Score:3)
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There's no creative work included in UMG products. They do a lot of science to devise formulas that maximise the appeal (and thus profit) of songs generated that way, and their data was seeded by art (and "art") that was produced in actually creative ways originally, but these days it's nothing but an iterative process scored by market research.
There are separate teams producing lyrics, score, cover images, scene choreography, and so on, and the singers are picked based on spectral analysis of their voices
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As absurd as a computer beating humans in Go?
Let's face it, there's not a huge amount of creativity needed, and a lot of it can come from the audience. There's a lot of demand out there for bland, serviceable content that just fulfills a function. AI is first coming for things like random illustrations for blog posts and elevator music.
AI also acts as a force magnifier. Yeah, the truly impressive creations there needed the guiding hand of a real artist, but that artist got the job done in 10% of the time, s
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As absurd as a computer beating humans in Go?
The two things are not even remotely comparable.
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There's also no creativity in most of modern music, what's your point?
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Does it need to be that creative? Over the last couple of years it's been building up to this with systems trained on things like Bach and then generating stuff that sounds similar. And similar enough, if you believe the stories, to fool people who know their Bach.
So far, so not very interesting, I'd agree. It's derivative and clever but not interesting. Give an system Beethoven's music before his final decade and have it make similar leaps he did then that's interesting. But that's not - so far - what's be
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there is no creativity there
And neither in human art. It's all reshuffling or inversion of something that has already been done, commercial music more than the rest, but everything really. We can try this. Pick something you believe to be a complete, utter work of pure creativity, and I'm almost certain I could, with some effort, find everything that super-creative thing is but a new mixture off.
The only three areas in which true creativity, in the sense of something completely novel that isn't a rearrangement or inversion of somethin
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So you don't think that any work should be protected by copyright then?
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So you don't think that any work should be protected by copyright then?
That's correct. I oppose the entire concept of copyright on principle.
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That principle being ... that you don't think that you personally benefit from it?
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That principle being ... that you don't think that you personally benefit from it?
Nope. I'm an "IP conservative", if you will. I adopt the traditional notion, valid from the origin of art 35,000 BCE all the way until 1,709 CE, according which:
a) Intellectual production, if done for money, is a service paid once by the patron to the author/painter/composer/etc. After completion it is in the hands of the patron, and may or not be copied by the patron or by others, as they will.
b) If done for some other purpose, exists for others appreciation, who may or not copy it, as they will.
c) No mone
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How foolish.
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Yep! (y)
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On one hand, this is a good thing.
You don't really want AI to be trained on nothing but billboard top 100, or just whatever the top pop songs are, because of the potential that THEY THEMSELVES used AI to create those tracks.
If you've ever used autotune, you've used an AI. Maybe not GAN-based AI, but definitely something that reduced the work needed by the studio.
Now without being facetious, There are always two or more sides to AI debates, and the one most people agree on is that AI's should not be trained
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Could see an AI trained on specific movies and huge pool of celeb appearances and voices, being used to replace players in films; Fan Casting taken to next level.
The world can finally have Peter O'Tool as Elrond, Arnold as Boromir, and Madonna as Eowyn.
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Let's be real, you can't gatekeep enough material from AI training
Go further. You can't gatekeep material period. In a world where automated downloading tools exist for streaming service what makes them think anyone can do anything specifically against AI?
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I'm surprised it has taken them this long. A few years ago someone, I think it was Deezer engineers from memory, came up with an AI that could separate music and vocals, and even individual instruments. Aside from making karaoke better, it's quite helpful for people learning to be able to listen to just the vocals, or just the instrument they are playing.
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Single Dimension Thinking.
The next step is the "Universal Music AI Training License" yours for only $5m
Re: Losing battle (Score:2)
Re: Losing battle (Score:3)
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Same difference as you digging a hole with you hands in the ground and using heavy machinery to it. Scale
Difference? (Score:5, Interesting)
I listen to all your songs, learn your style, and then write my own music that is similar, and not infringing.
My AI bot listens to all your songs, learns your style, and then writes its own music that is similar, and not infringing.
What's the difference?
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They're more afraid of a single AI that can churn out a songs on demand and to taste for pennies than they are of a single human who never gets noticed in the first place.
Doesn't matter, you can't stop it. Once a trained AI gets out 'in the wild', it's over. You'll buy a portable player that connects to your car stereo and/or replaces your portable music player, or it'll be a download for your phone... and the big guys get completely cut out.
Re:Difference? (Score:4, Informative)
What's the difference?
Apparently that you’re licensed to listen to the songs and your AI bot is not. At least if it’s a UMG artist.
Re: Difference? (Score:2)
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What's the difference?
The capacity for creativity.
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What we call creativity is a sufficiently complex neural network. AI is getting there.
Also, have you heard what are the top 10 pop songs right now? You'd think they're already AI-generated, and cheaply.
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What we call creativity is a sufficiently complex neural network.
That's bold claim. Prove it. :)
People have been making these ridiculous claims that we are just [whatever the latest thing is] since at least the 1960's. When some new thing comes around, those same people laugh at how foolish they were in the past and go on about how this time is really different, and we must really be [whatever the latest thing is]. You'd think they'd learn, but they never do.
Joe Weizenbaum, 1976:
There is, however, still another assumption that information-processing modelers of man make that may be false, and whose denial severely undermines their program: that there exists one and only one class and only one class of information processes, and that every member of that class is reducible to the kind of information processes exemplified by such systems as GPS and Schank-like language-understanding formalisms. [...] There is a parable in that, too: the power man has acquired through his science and technology has itself been converted into impotence.
I have no idea what drives people to so desperately try to reduce themselves to such a pit
Re: Difference? (Score:2)
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At the moment an AGI is at most 2 years away, by any way you would like to measure it.
This seems to be the talking point in the public and the media, but it's far from consensus among the people who work on these things. The functionality you see from ChatGPT and the others right now does not extrapolate into the features that many people want to believe are coming. And, of course, there's no shortage of people with a financial stake in the current tools proselytizing about it.
But the truth is that LLMs do a great job of *simulating* intelligence. There are a lot of examples of them assemb
Re: Difference? (Score:2)
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That's just wishful thinking and has no basis in reality. There are real and significant limitations to LLMs that don't simply disappear just because you make the model bigger, even if you are spooked by the output. People were spooked by Eliza as well, and made similarly absurd predictions.
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The capacity for creativity.
Creativity is not that different to what an AI does. Humans aren't inherently creative. It's largely a case of seeing something and creating it by our own hand applying our own inputs which are formed from something *else* we have seen. The only difference is AI isn't a creative person sitting at home painting in his free time, AI is a creative company told by someone what they want painted.
There are very few truly creative individuals in the world, you can see this with art how entire periods were spearhea
Re: Difference? (Score:2)
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Thank you.
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Nobody cared about copyright when copying involved scribes painstakingly duplicating manuscripts. When printing presses became a thing, it was seen as important that the original creators received some compensation.
Is an AI generated piece not infringing though? It's just an algorithmic modification of existing data, after all. Maybe that's all the brain's doing as well but copyright law treats our brains as something special.
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> I listen to all your songs, learn your style, and then write my own music that is similar, and not infringing.
There are examples where it has been found to be infringing, like My Sweet Lord. George Harrison was sued by Ronnie Mack's music labels, and they won.
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But by the time the case concluded, Apple Records owned Ronnie Mack's music labels. So Harrison still won, or at least lost to himself.
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Same difference as you digging a hole with you hands in the ground and using heavy machinery to it. Scale
(oops, replied on wrong comment at first)
Cat? Bag? GIANT FUCKING HOLE! (Score:1)
We've had streaming services for years.
We've had CD/DVD/other digital storage for years.
Radio.
TV.
At this point, you're fighting tidal wave with a handful of sand from about 40 fathoms down.
Re: Cat? Bag? GIANT FUCKING HOLE! (Score:2)
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Apparently the mysteries of a MICROPHONE JACK are beyond them...
Re: Cat? Bag? GIANT FUCKING HOLE! (Score:2)
Inspiration ist verboten! (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole AI thing is getting so interesting.
We've been told that AI-produced IP doesn't qualify for copyright protection -- which would seem to imply that AI itself is not a "legal entity".
But then we've seen AI being sued for defamation -- which will obviously fail if the point above is true -- since there's no "legal entity" to sue.
And now we're told that AI is somehow not granted the right to be "inspired" by other creative works in the way that a human might be.
Surely it's time someone nailed down the legal status of AI. Is it a legal entity (and thus subject to and protected by the laws of the land) or is it something completely new that requires its own categorization.
Until this is resolved things are just going to get messier and messier.
Re: Inspiration ist verboten! (Score:5, Insightful)
None of which I understand. It is clear the AI is just a tool of whomever owns (or rents, or licenses) it.
If I use a CAD program to design something, do I not own that output because I used a computer program to do it? Using a computer program that implements an AI is no different.
Modpoints (Score:2)
Could someone with mod points please do your thing on the above comment.
Until someone claims AI is sentient, this is the only true conclusion to an argument commonly made to sell newspapers.
Interestingly, Google is (allegedly) asserting it owns the copyright to Bard's output - but this is an irrelevant side argument - like if AutoCad asserted copyright over its auto-generated vector calculations - The copyright may be owned by the manufacturer of the tool or the user of the tool, depending on relevant copyr
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Until someone claims AI is sentient,
You'd have to be pretty stupid to make that claim.
but the tool has no claim to the copyright.
To receive copyright protection, there needs to be "at least a modicum" of creativity [umich.edu]. AI, as it is today, completely lacks that capacity. Neither the tool nor tool user can make a legitimate copyright claim. They made the right call [engadget.com].
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I think the legal issue is going to be around creativity. Our current models aren't creative at all, they just use probability to churn out the next token. They don't really even know they're working with language but AFAIK use "temperature" to tweak the probability engine as a way to optimize the form of the output.
As in, if they're writing an essay they will choose more unlikely tokens than if they're engaging in conversation because essays use more "difficult" (thus unlikely) words.
The creative input
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Or maybe a song...
Verse 1:
A wonder of the world, beneath the ocean waves
A rainbow of color, a symphony of life
But now it's fading fast, like a dream that slips away
The Great Barrier Reef, in peril and in strife
Chorus:
We must save the reef, before it's gone
The loss of diversity, it can't go on
We have to act, before it's too late
For the sake of our planet, let's change our fate
Verse 2:
The coral's turning white, the fish are disappearing
The waters are polluted, the shoreline is encroaching
We've taken too much,
Re: Inspiration ist verboten! (Score:2)
On the other hand, courts are saying the AI can't own a copyright because the letter of the law says they can't, which goes back to the fact that they're not sentient beings or capab
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But then we've seen AI being sued for defamation
Actually we haven't. You're confusing two different things. AI doesn't qualify for copyright protection was a test case brought by an artist and a user.
The defamation suit on the other hand was brought by a person against a parent organisation that has clearly shown they are gatekeeping the output of the AI chatbot.
The platform was incapable of generating copyrighted material, but the publisher is very much capable of being sued. At present the legal status is clear, AI itself is not a legal entity. Though
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I mean think about this: we all know one of the very best songwriters of recent years is one Taylor Alison Swift. Will the upcoming ChatGPT-5 be able to write a song with AI as good as what Swift does now?
seriously? (Score:2)
I can't even write a serious comment to this..... my gawd....
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Use ChatGPT... They seem to :).
Re:seriously? (Score:4, Funny)
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF [insert name of district]
[Name of Music Company],
Plaintiff,
v.
[Name of AI Music Creator],
Defendant.
Case No. [insert case number]
BRIEF FOR PLAINTIFF
INTRODUCTION
This case concerns the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create music that is generated using copyrighted musical works owned by [Name of Music Company]. The Defendant, [Name of AI Music Creator], has used [Name of Music Company]'s copyrighted music to train an AI algorithm to create new music, which the Defendant then distributed and made available to the public without [Name of Music Company]'s consent. This conduct constitutes copyright infringement, and the Plaintiff seeks damages and injunctive relief to prevent the Defendant from continuing to infringe on Plaintiff's copyrights.
STATEMENT OF FACTS
[Name of Music Company] is a major music company that owns the copyrights to numerous musical works. These copyrighted works include both original compositions and recorded performances of those compositions. [Name of AI Music Creator] is an individual or entity that has created an AI algorithm that generates new music using existing musical works as input. The Defendant has trained the algorithm using copyrighted musical works owned by [Name of Music Company]. The resulting music generated by the AI includes musical elements that are substantially similar to those in the copyrighted works owned by [Name of Music Company].
ARGUMENT
I. The Defendant's use of [Name of Music Company]'s copyrighted music to train an AI algorithm constitutes copyright infringement.
A. The Defendant's conduct amounts to reproduction and distribution of [Name of Music Company]'s copyrighted works.
The Defendant's use of [Name of Music Company]'s copyrighted musical works to train an AI algorithm amounts to unauthorized reproduction of those works. Under 17 U.S.C. 106(1), copyright owners have the exclusive right to reproduce their works. By copying [Name of Music Company]'s musical works in order to train an AI algorithm, the Defendant has violated Plaintiff's exclusive right to reproduce its works.
Furthermore, the Defendant's distribution of music generated by the AI algorithm that incorporates elements of [Name of Music Company]'s copyrighted works constitutes unauthorized distribution of those works. Under 17 U.S.C. 106(3), copyright owners have the exclusive right to distribute their works. By making music generated by the AI algorithm available to the public, the Defendant has violated Plaintiff's exclusive right to distribute its works.
B. The Defendant's use of [Name of Music Company]'s copyrighted music is not a fair use.
The Defendant may argue that the use of [Name of Music Company]'s copyrighted music to train an AI algorithm constitutes a fair use under 17 U.S.C. 107. However, the Defendant's use of the copyrighted music fails to satisfy any of the four factors used to determine whether a use is fair.
First, the purpose and character of the use is commercial, as the Defendant distributes the resulting music generated by the AI algorithm for profit. Second, the nature of the copyrighted work is creative and expressive, which weighs against a finding of fair use. Third, the amount and substantiality of the portion used by the Defendant is substantial, as the Defendant used entire copyrighted musical works to train the AI algorithm. Fourth, the effect of the use on the market for the copyrighted work is substantial, as the Defendant's use of the copyrighted music to generate new works undermines the market for the original works.
II. The Plaintiff is entitled to damages and injunctive relief.
As a result of the Defendant's infringement of Plaintiff's copyrights, the Plaintiff is entitled to damages and injunctive relief. Under 17 U.S.C. 504, the Plaintiff is entitled to damages, including actual........
Why should they care? (Score:2)
We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists.
I see one of two possibilities here.
A) AIs create music people don't care about listening to, and the artists aren't affected.
B) AIs create music people want to listen to, and Spotify streams those songs to their customers.
I fail to see how Spotify would care either way, as long as their customers keep paying to stream it. If anything, I think it would be better for Spotify to generate their own music to stream. Maybe if/when we get to the point where AI can generate in real time on our phones they would
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The problem is that "B" has a marginal cost of zero.
In the future, good original music of any genre will be free.
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RIAA on the wrong side of history (Score:4, Interesting)
While I can understand these vultures wanting to protect themselves from irrelevance, and totally appreciate that AI training was probably unforeseen in their copyright terms; it brings me great joy to see them follow the RIAA's footsteps in putting themselves firmly on the wrong side of history.
(if you think UMG, Sony Music or WMG in any way represent the artists they publish; I refer you to Courtney Love's speech to the Digital Hollywood Online Entertainment Conference, given in New York on May 16, 2000)
Re: RIAA on the wrong side of history (Score:2)
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(if you think UMG, Sony Music or WMG in any way represent the artists they publish
Artists who don't think the labels represent their interests can not sign with them.
Yet most new artists leap at a chance to sign.
Courtney Love's speech
Ms. Love is only rich and famous because of the very people she criticizes. She is biting the hand that fed her.
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She is biting the hand that fed her.
... so you're saying she'd have more credibility if she didn't bite the hand that feeds?
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Without the help of the labels, her credibility would be irrelevant because she'd be a random nobody.
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Without others, everybody is a "random nobody"
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She's intimately[multiple meanings] knowledgeable about those very people. You can doubt a robber's morals, but such a person is a good source of information about inner workings of their gang -- thus it's exactly biting the feeding hand that we want.
stop paying attention to these fools (Score:1)
those asshats have resisted every advancement in digital technology no matter how much money it makes them. why the hell would we start listening to those clowns now?
Can't have an AI imitating Ye ... (Score:2)
Ow snap, too late :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Now even death cannot keep bad artists from releasing new albums.
AI has gone to the dark side indeed.
For decades, media companies have made this (Score:2)
We also have a moral responsibility. (Score:2)
As a society, we also have a moral responsibility... to make sure that AI is trained on good music, not recycled, formulaic crap from major record labels like Universal Music Group, so it all works out.
Intelligent Beings (Score:2)
"We have become aware that certain AI systems might have been trained on copyrighted content without..."
We have become aware than certain intelligent people might have learned to play music based on copyrighted content without...oh...wait...that's allowed.
I agree (Score:2)
The last thing we need is that AI could mistakenly learn that any of their crap is actually music.
Universal talking about Morality? (Score:2)
Now, that IS funny.
They're afraid AI music will be just as good... (Score:2)
Re: They're afraid AI music will be just as good.. (Score:2)
Fear based policy (Score:2)
The music industry has managed itself via fear since the 70s.
In the 70s artists feared cassette tapes because they could be copied easily allowing "illegal" sharing. Then in the 80s they were scared of CDs because they sounded so perfect and allowed infinate high quality copies on tape to be made. Then in the 90s, they were scared because people could copy CDs directly to another CD. Then the Internet and Napster came along allowing someone to get nearly any music for free for very little effort. Then in th
Regulatory capture (Score:2)