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Music AI Google

Google and Universal Music Discuss Making an AI Tool To Replicate Artists' Voices 44

Posted by BeauHD from the ready-or-not-here-it-comes dept.
According to the Financial Times, Universal Music Group and Google are considering developing a tool that people can use to create AI-generated music using popular artists' voices and melodies. Gizmodo reports: Under the licensing deal, the relevant copyright owners would be paid for the use of their likeness and would have the option to opt in to give UMG and Google permission to license AI-generated music using their voice, per the FT. Google and UMG are in the early stages of negotiations over creating the deepfake tool, and there aren't currently any plans to immediately launch it.

Robert Kyncl, the CEO of Warner Music Group, voiced his opposition to deepfake technology in a conference earnings call on Tuesday, saying artists should always have a choice if they'll allow their likeness to be used. "There's nothing more precious to an artist than their voice," Kyncl said in the call, "and protecting their voice is protecting their livelihood and protecting their persona."
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Google and Universal Music Discuss Making an AI Tool To Replicate Artists' Voices More

Google and Universal Music Discuss Making an AI Tool To Replicate Artists' Voices

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  • If all music became computer generated, I'd see no reason why anyone would want to pay anything to listen to it. SAG-AFTRA and the TV and movie writers aren't going to be the only ones going on strike over things like this, I see.

    • humanity (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Once they've taken our humanity what do we have left?

    • Good. Strike and scream and cry - the schadenfreude is strong with me... and they are still gonna lose. I hope to be able to give them a "learn to code" lecture where I tell them they have to not fear change and just go into a completely new industry like we did to IT 20 years ago.

      • hope to be able to give them a "learn to code" lecture

        Don't get too comfortable my dude.

        As a coder I'm telling you right now, our job isn't going to exist a decade from now. Its just gonna be jackass project managers and bots.

        • As a coder I'm telling you right now, our job isn't going to exist a decade from now. Its just gonna be jackass project managers and bots.

          I dunno how long you've been doing it, but it's been a few decades for me. I've heard so many variations of "AI is gonna take your job" that I'm numb. Silver bullet code-solutions *never* work. CASE method and graphical programming didn't work. A zillion "frameworks" didn't work. A dozen new idiotic "methodologies" didn't work, even when joined at the hip with the frameworks. Riding-shotgun AI code-coaches didn't work. They've been trying for a very long time. If it happens it's going to be quite an upset

          • “AI” only has to drive down salaries to be a success.
            • You aren't wrong. However, good luck with that. I remember management hopes to drive down salaries with CASE Method and other stupid-shit and that didn't work either. The key is not to be some dipshit dime-a-dozen web developer (I refuse to touch that low-pay garbage). Work in embedded or niche systems programming and you won't have to worry. Indians, Romanians, and Russians didn't have these systems to grow up with. They were too busy writing PHP SQL injection code and trying to rob western companies. The

      • I see you're one of those race to the bottom type haters.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      At present, there is a thriving music-laundering-for-ad-revenue scheme going on Youtube.

      RVC and SO-VITS-SVC

      How RVC works is it basically "skins" a singer into another voice. So if you find 10-20 minutes of a subject you want something to sound like (just acquire their music on CD) run it through voice remover to split the voice from the music, train on it, (takes about an hour on a high end GPU) then pick something you want to steal-borrow-launder. Works best if the subject is in the same key and gender, pi

    • All your sig really does is it advertises your TDS, but I agree that people won't pay to listen to autogenerated music. And more than that: they will not listen to it, except maybe in places like elevators where they have no choice.

  • And? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sarren1901 ( 5415506 ) on Thursday August 10, 2023 @07:01PM (#63757660)

    So what. Music doesn't require corporate sponsorship. In fact, if you stick to indy music you'll probably enjoy it more anyway. Artist can write their own music and produce it for so much cheaper given today's technology.

    Sure, they may not make it to the top, but most musicians don't anyway.

    Many popular acts are already pretty faces singing other people's music. May as well just skip the pretty face and go straight for computer performed music composed by someone else or AI. We could even put a human-like robot up on stage to sing the AI generated music! Probably be about as good as your average pop is anyway.

    It won't be killing off music produced by people that want to produce music, but it might regulate it to a hobby or we may very well see a major surge in people wanting to only support the indy scene and fuck the RIAA!

  • By "artist" they mean it will be in their contract that the corporation will own the deepfake singing of all of their artists.

    This is the beginning play to stop the artists negotiating with 3rd parties on their own.

    • Hey, if it's "opt in", then I think it's an opportunity to establish a compensation framework as precedent. Don't undervalue that.

      The singing deepfakes will arise, no matter what. If your contract says you get paid, you're ahead of the game.

  • What no more rockstars? After watching celebs behavior during the pandemic, they can all go work as stockers, clerks, phone solicitors, and dog washers as far as I'm concerned. I'm not interested in their personal problems with AI and what-not. Where were they when these suits put the Sword of Damacles on the neck of IT workers and started offshoring like crazy etc? They didn't even know it was happening. All the sudden someome comes to threaten their gig and it's an emergency? No fuck that. Feel it you bas
    • You don't want to bow down and kiss Hollywood's ass? Whatever do you mean!? These people had all the "correct" answer during the pandemic. Don't you want to help them survive the suits coming for *their* jobs now? Yeah, so they blew off the flood of H1B's and offshoring, but hey, you wanna miss the next episode of your streaming show?! Inconceivable!

  • With AI voice generation, it should be fairly straightforward to take a song and change the lyrics, but have it sound like the original artist was singing it. It's Weird Al in an app. Toss in Chat GPT, and you could just give it a song and tell it what you want the song to be about, and it would rewrite the lyrics and make it sound like the original artist had sung them.

    And you could even take songs and make them sound like the artist was really singing the lyrics in the liner notes, not something differe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      With AI voice generation, it should be fairly straightforward to take a song and change the lyrics, but have it sound like the original artist was singing it.

      Great. Now we can hear Bing Crosby singing White Christmas rewritten as a neo-Nazi anthem. Somehow this doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

    • AI struggles with humor. So do comedians. What makes something funny is a very hard question. I think Weird Al is safe for a while.

  • The leader of the Black Eyed Peas predicted this over a decade ago and was working with technology companies to sample his voice to be reused for new songs at the press of a button. Artists need to embrace this.
    • I didn't know he was doing that, that's interesting. I agree artists need to embrace it.
      • He's been talking about it for awhile. Here is a vid from 5 years ago but I remember an even older video he did where he was showing the rest of the band a device in studio that a company made for him that would would generate his voice on the fly. It freaked the rest of the band out and they all hated it and thought it would steal their jobs. He kept pleading with them to think about how it could be a tool to make their lives easier as well as be used far in the future when they retire or eventually die

    • The Black Eyed Peas suck.

  • Going for gold (Score:3)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Thursday August 10, 2023 @09:37PM (#63757906)

    ...in the lack of creativity olympics
    There are millions of musicians making original music but the record company weasels want more AI generated Nirvana songs that sound just like Nirvana, Beatle songs that sound just like the Beatles, etc
    WTF is wrong with those moroons?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      ...in the lack of creativity olympics
      There are millions of musicians making original music but the record company weasels want more AI generated Nirvana songs that sound just like Nirvana, Beatle songs that sound just like the Beatles, etc
      WTF is wrong with those moroons?

      Nothing is wrong. They want the money.

      It's the same reason the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are on strike. The AMPTP want to scan an actor (a day's pay) and use that likeness forever. Why? To make more money. After all, an AI actor doesn't have to be p

  • Given how generic and over-engineered chart music is, would the listeners even notice the music was written and performed using AI?

  • Yeah, right. Is the leopard still guarding that door in the basement?

  • You'd think, once upong a time, the middleman between audience and artist would be considered to be Google and Universal Music.
    In pop music, these days, the artist is the middleman between the publishers and the audience, and they're about to be cut...
    Even though I dislike pop, this general movement to cut out the artists is very problematic. Artists create, the people at Universal or Google that make these decisions to cut out people do not create anything but problems in society.

    • Surely the publisher is the intermediary between the artist and the audience?
      Most people don't know or care who their favourite artist's publisher is, but their money goes to the publisher and the publisher pays it to the artist after taking their cut.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JustNiz ( 692889 )

        not really, at least in the last lets say 50 years.
        All the pop music you see today is mostly a product of the production company. The music itself is almost irrelevant compared to to the artist's social media hype, physical image, what clothes they wear, how they dance, what "political" message they have, their perceived relevance and marketability to various age, gender and race demographics, etc, etc. Pop artists are entirely just creations of the publisher's marketing department. The music itself is the

  • You know back in my day *shakes cane* they used to call this stealing.

  • For some artists, the voice is irrelevant because the music is garbage, and the only thing that matters is the persona.

    For some artists, the voice is irrelevant, because what matters is the interpretation.

    Therefore, this idea will flop.

  • Other than young teenagers?

    I foresee a multi-billion-dollar "we're shutting it down". Remember the Metaverse? Yeah, neither do I.

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