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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

I can understand the author's feelings on this. It's fun, and it's exciting that with no knowledge of a domain the author can get interesting results. It can "feel like" creativity, even though literally anyone can get good results.

Similarly, AI-remixed¹ music is getting better and better. I want to know how the author will feel when their music² is used to build a model that allows anyone to create infinite music in their style and beyond, much of which will be enjoyed far more widely (because it will be free or royalty-free) than the source material ever will.

¹ It doesn't seem fair to call it "generated" or "created" when it'd be useless without an enormous corpus of source material powering the thing.

² https://vegadeftwing.bandcamp.com/

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I'd be fine with it being used to train models. The music world is already extremely derivative and trendy. In western music anyway, we have 12 notes to go around and often only use a subset per song. Additionally, much of a song's structure is formulaic, even with music as experimental as my own. I've used AI tools for composition (though I've always had to modify their outputs), pretty much all musicians use samples, etc. If anything, I see the use of AI as a step towards having less reuse in music because of the ability for generes to bleed together.

> I'd be fine with it being used to train models.

Right now, your music requires attribution and can't be used for commercial purposes.

Should visual artists have the same ability to choose the rights they reserve?

> Right now, your music requires attribution and can't be used for commercial purposes.

Sure, but fair use still exists. If someone takes just a single drum hit, reverses it, and coats it in distortion and reverb, but some how I find out they did it, I can sue them. But I can sue over anything, that doesn't mean I'd win. I'm pretty confident they would, and would agree they should because it's fair use. I think training an AI model is fair use as well.

> Should visual artists have the same ability to choose the rights they reserve?

Yes, and within the bounds of fair use as musicians that I've stated above. If I photoshop out a single eye, let's call it 50x100 pixels of a 5000x5000 image, and use it to make a neat mash up art, I think that is transformative enough to be fair use. Similarly, I think the AI model is transformative enough.

In either case, there are limits. If someone makes a model fine tuned on my specific music, that's wrong. Similarly, if someone makes a model fine tuned on an artists specific work without their permission, that's wrong. Using an artist name (music or drawing) in a prompt is gray, but I personally think leans on being acceptable, especially if that artist is dead.

like the enormous corpus of source material powering every adult human brain?

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