Record labels panic as A.I. generated song becomes ‘hit single’
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Someone's vocal characteristics are not meaningfully creative; it's the intellectual content of a work and specific instance of a performance of an artist's skill in singing or writing or drawing or fabricating that content, that makes the result copyrightable. Therefore, it seems like it's a stretch to think voice-mimicking AI works might be copyrightable by the mimicked artists.
You can't sue someone for mimicking someone else's voice well enough to be confused for the mimicked creator's voice. Some people can do some voices quite well. AI can just do it better, faster.
I hope the courts put a swift end to this, but maybe they'll try to uphold the status quo—entertainment megacorps get what they want—and only reverse course after a few years when it becomes clear that everyone's mimicking everyone else's voices and pictures for fun and profit and any attempt to maintain copyright or any other IP protection on such mimicry is absurd.
But I think that’s immaterial as I think the answer is that it doesn’t matter if you train on copyrighted work. Or maybe better that you don’t need a special license.
If I steal books and train on them, then I think that’s copyright infringement not because of the training but because I made an infringing copy. However, if I have a license already to read those books (ie, I bought a copy at a book store) then it’s not infringement to train an AI, or loan it to a million people or whatever I like with it as I bought a copy.
Yes but you’re not allowed to copy and distribute so you’re never going to actually do that. Also you’ll pass away with the knowledge you gained unlike the AI you’re training it on which will contain remnants of the work in all copies of itself, however abstracted away you consider it.
I can very legally loan my book or movie to one person a week for all perpetuity so it could be a million people. Does the actual number matter?
Or viewing it on my television requires multiple copies as the data moves through wires and tuners and memory and storage. Obviously a video just be copied into RAM to process and display for normal viewing. Why would making a copy in memory to run through a training algorithm be different than an algorithm to encode or decode for display on a screen?
I don’t think transmission should count as making copies.
It’s different to store material vs stream and process.
“Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
There’s no way to look at your brain to perceive, reproduce, or communicate a work that you looked at, so under US law, your neurons are not a copy.
As for decoding a video to display it on a television, yes, that process requires making copies. That is why if you don’t have a license to a work, then decoding and displaying it is copyright infringement.
The problem with the music industry is the industry part : it's been generating standardized, and easily mass produced music for the past 20 years. You can't expect the process to not be fully automated eventually ( i've already felt like some pop or rap song could have been for a long time).
You can't expect it not to backfire at some point. And IMHO this is well deserved.
And it’s going to be even worse with multimodal ai and robotics : imagine a robot walking in the streets, looking at cars, and ads, and people, then generate original content based on what it saw on the street (much like a human do). Who’s going to collect for all the licensed content it was exposed to ?
That's going to be totally impossible to apply. Imagine a sound processing software than "learned" mixing based on a collection of popular records, and provide you, the composer, with presets => wrong, copyright.
Ok, now imagine an ai that learned how to configure a sound processing software based on records. It only outputs numbers and presets for the software. => wrong, copyright.
Now, imagine an ai that learned those settings, by asking hundreds of human what they like in some kind of A/B testing. The humans will judge based on the songs they've heard in their lives, and the end-result (the settings) will basically be the same as in the previous example. But somehow, this will be fine.
Honestly, i don't see how this can fly.
Those AI produce original content. The means by which they produce it shouldn’t be relevant.
The means through which a piece of content has been produced is totally irrelevant. The original content has to be distinguishable in the new one for copyright laws to apply. This has been judged over and over when sampling became more and more widespread. Some DJ sampled the original songs blatantly and thus had to pay the original authors. Others applied so many sound transformations that it was basically impossible to identify and thus copyright was basically impossible to apply.
“If it could learn openai would create a new programming language, train it for real, and it would be the greatest programmer.” I don’t understand what you’re saying here. It can invent new languages, but they would those be better than existing ones? It’s less intelligent than a human (though still intelligent) so the language would be worse than existing ones
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188
I used to think “well this dumb law can’t be so bad if it kills Facebook that’s a net positive” but I don’t think having directions that allow Beatles cover bands like Oasis but disallow an AI Oasis will be good for society. Comically, I think this because one day we’ll be digital beings and it will be funny if these old timey 21st century laws only allow creativity from meat-based consciousnesses because my digital consciousness is basically just an advanced AI that I legally treat as me.
On the other side if you just dump tons of artist into a model to teach it how to draw, it'll be a much harder argument to make when the result doesn't really look like any artist in particular.
However a big problem with current models is that their vocabulary is still quite limited, so the only way to get some interesting art style with just a text prompt is to have a "by <artist name>" in the prompt. That's rather fishy. Meanwhile if you custom train a model, the amount of images you put into it will be drastically lower and more focused than what went into into initial training, so that's a bit fishy too.
Long term I expect art models to filter trademark terms and just get better language understanding or other means of input (e.g. sketches in ControlNet), so that the model ends up being unable to reproduce something close to an existing work out of the box. It wouldn't stop the user from using that model to perform some copyright violation, but it would require intend and effort on the users part.
Few people are arguing this is an issue of copyright infringement. It's a very weak argument.
> You can't sue someone for mimicking someone else's voice well enough
This isn't "mimicking". You can sue someone for impersonating you, especially if money is involved.
Taking a brief look at that case, the way AI is being used is distinguished from that case in an important respect. Hedwig, a backup singer for Midler, mimicked a specific song that Midler had made, after Ford couldn't get Midler to perform it for their ad. It seems reasonable that doing that, for profit and for broadcast, would violate Midler's right of publicity, and maybe even the performance copyright on the existing song.
In Midler v. Ford, Ford had a license from the publisher to use the song, so Midler’s case was based on the publicity right, if I recall correctly.
Also, the publicity right can’t be implicated just by copying a style or genre. It has to be imitating the person without permission.
What if I use AI to make and sell web dev educational content using the voice & likeness of Evan You, for example? Where are the lines?
Isn’t this in some way bootleg merchandise? As identity becomes radically easier to duplicate, should laws adapt? While impressive & novel, I think AI mimicry is its least useful (and likely most dangerous) feature.
Absolutely not true. It's called "appropriation of likeness." If the representation is reasonably likely to be confused with or linked to the famous person, that person can sue.
One case I found funny was that of a porta-potty company called Here's Johnny. Johnny Carson successful sued them: https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p/casebrief-c...
Someone else in this thread tried to provide a case on point, but it doesn't seem to be, either.
Has anyone been successfully sued for mimicking someone else's voice and singing an original song?
Has anyone been successfully sued for mimicking someone else's appearance, and parading around and taking advantage of that likeness, without falsely claiming (in seriousness) to be the mimicked person (which might be fraud or something)?
If there’s any commercial purpose to the imitation, the imitated person stands a chance to successfully sue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
I'm not legally qualified to speak on the topic.
Conceptually someone's unequivocal identifier is part of their likeness. Maybe Drake's vocal cords and characteristics unequivocally and measurably differ from everyone else's.
I wouldn't want to live some where my face, name, image and (maybe?) my trained voice can be ripped off 24/7 by a typist with AI generative tools, even if the result was economic benefit to me.
If I can use Tom Hanks' voice for the cost of a ChatGPT prompt, in my next powerpoint presentation about the dangers of AI... why wouldn't I?
But I expect we’ll see some new law, or lots of “Drake-style vocals” in song labels.
Cover bands exist and can even sing new songs while sounding like the original. So Journey hiring someone who sounds exactly like Steve Perry seems perfectly legal. So Journal training an AI on Steve Perry and having a robot sing exactly like him seems find as long as there’s no presentation as if it is Steve Perry singing or endorsing or using his celebrity likeness.
These are very different things.
'The cheapening human experience' is not a court case.
I wish to high heaven and the three hells that it was, but it isn't.
So: what do we do now?
Arbitrary or not, this technology serves companies more so than workers. It’s not clear the benefits outweigh the cost to society. The cool factor is not a compelling enough argument to allow it unrestricted. Everyone needs work, that’s a basic fact of life. We should be mindful knowing one day we will be targets of replacement.
As consumers, we should avoid supporting, where possible, commercial uses of AI voices and as citizens, support new laws that curtail their commercial use. Not sure what else can be done as people will use this stuff commercially if able and people will consume it because it exists.
It would be nice if people who lost their voice could get it back. Although he would be less iconic, speech synthesis like this could have given Stephen Hawking his voice back. That harms no one so I can see exceptions for such cases.
And I don’t think it’s harm so much as lack of lots of money.
I don’t think Adele will get paid less for her concerts and music if there are a billion Adele sounding AIs singing the news to everyone.
You can sue someone for Financial/ID theft and impersonation though. Many shady artists were (and still are) using celebrity names in their track titles to get attention for their music releases prior to this. The problem is services like Spotify and YouTube (content search) primarily working based on keywords, and also in those same types of music services only being geared towards major industry artists rather than giving everyone an even playing field to have their music heard... It encourages scam and spam environments, as well as impersonation by artists accounts for the tiny profit they pay.
By posting music with the "emulated" voice in it (which is actually tiny samples of the artist's actual voice), the Ai tools allow and encourage people to create songs and title them as if they were made by the actual artist. In the emulator, they list the authentic artist's name as an option, which technically highlights that they are complicit in facilitating production of music that impersonates the named artist.
Imagine if you're an emerging artist and beginning to gain traction in your career, then all of a sudden, because of an Ai web site, hundreds of people start flooding streaming services with low quality, parody, and even good music using your name, while also collecting royalties off of it... That can ruin a musician's brand and cause damage to the artist's reputation that they can't recover from. There are legal protections against that, even without copyrights, but it can often involve a lengthy court battle.
I'm a musician myself, I am not a lawyer, I do my best to stay out of court.
It's better for everyone if everyone simply puts out their own original music, or properly credited samples and/or remixes with artist consent and permission.
If the fake/imitation song makers are required to label their releases as parody or impersonation, then they'll get no streams, as most of the bootleg streams they got were due to putting out a mimicked (pseudo-authentic) release as if it was done by the actual artist.
Reputational harm is also a serious case that can also be filed... With an artist as popular as Drake (for example) that can lead to a financially devastating judgement.
Anyway, ghostwriter clearly demarked Heart on My Sleeve as being AI-assisted. Furthermore, the tracks were first sung and then AI was used to transform the voices. It's hardly more than another tool in the audio production toolbox.
Oh you most certainly can. In fact, you can sue someone for sounding too much like himself. Just ask John Fogerty.
Tom Waits might disagree: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/singer-tom-waits-sues...
This is absolutely not true. You might think when you hear someone singing that it's just their natural voice, but in fact they have trained their voice over years or decades to produce that particular sound.
The human vocal system is extremely more flexible than people think. Most people produce a particular sound out of pure habit and imagine that they can't produce any other. The most identifiable singers have invented a new sound (and then immediately get a bunch of copycats who don't do it as well)
The Weeknd does a pretty credible Michael Jackson-style vocal, and has noted that Jackson's Off the Wall was the album that inspired him to start singing.
Bruno Mars is famous for doing impressions of other singers as well as songs in various musical styles.
(He even had a singalong (sting-along?) with the actual Sting at the 2013 Grammy awards.)
“The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.”
On the other hand, people like Rob Sheridan are doing amazing things with AI art, and I've played with and enjoyed it myself as just another creative tool.
I suppose it depends what you think music, or art is general, is for.
I appreciate pop music and more artistic things.
Then I guess handmade or half handmade will be back in trend. The problem is after all this time AI was trending it was eating up talents and industries and after that a massive part of artists will be gone and the (human) industry shrunk. No more huge human made artistic ecosystem… Less worldwide talents. Less high quality and innovative ideas.
The Grateful D-AI-d?
I think I know some people who might enjoy that.
I've easily put thousands of hours on the Flying Fortress option - both my kids slept better with the low background rumble of WWII bombers thundering away in their rooms (the womb is very loud, and, yes, there's a womb noise simulator too), and I love it for office background noise, though my office doesn't have other people in it (typically).
I'm far, far more comfortable paying for this sort of thing, where he's gone and sampled stuff in person, than with something that's just "scraped the internet" and replicated something or another.
I’ve never heard of someone enjoying a song more after the 100th time. I’d say there’s a sweet spot around the 3rd or 4th play for me, after that I enjoy the song less on each play.
The actual numbers are quite a bit higher since not all of the listens have been tracked.
I still listen to this artist daily.
One thing that would be innovative / creative:
Imagine if an artist writes a song, then trains an AI on their own new song.
After doing that, they could have the AI produce a hundred variations of the song, and crowdsource which one is the best.
I understand they do something with commercials, but in a manual way. They basically publish multiple commercials and then measure the response to gauge which commercial resonates the most.
If the result is too same-y and you get bored of it, no problem, just hit the big red button. The AI also knows how to make a new song which is just different enough to excite you again, but still familiar enough to grab you in all the right ways.
We've tried it with social media (a feed generated and tuned to keep your brain clicking on ads), and the end result seems close enough to an utter disaster (in terms of impacts on society and humans) to try to avoid doing that thing again, in a different space.
Therefore, I'm sure it will happen quickly, and someone will make a lot of money on it. Feedback chambers are clearly profitable.
The interesting parts of being human, though (IMO...), are finding the different things you like. In the musical realm, conversations with other people about music where you have somewhat different tastes, find overlap, and have to be able to describe music in forms they'll understand (I personally prefer doing this without any actual music available to listen to...) is just fun.
As is tossing on something with a lot of randomness in the mix, finding something interesting, and going and exploring their catalog. I'll suggest Unleash the Archers, Northwest Passage, should you be interested in the "metal Canadian folk covers" category.
The smooth drug of AI-generated brain-rut music... sorry. I'll pass.
What if AI consumes the masterpieces of history, and then generates something even better, like how chess AI surpassed human chess masters?
(same idea as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35632879 )
AI increasing the music in the world and lowering the bar to creation will mean it can both generate music specific to a few people's tastes and guaranteed top 100 hits in some regions. Much like many human artists can do today.
That seems rather at odds with how I would define it, "The computers create a customized compelling reality for each person to keep them from considering anything interesting."
Can't stand suburbs and cities, though. I live rural and only leave the hill a few times a week.
I used to gloss over the words representing "constructs" as I had used in my last sentence. I finally groked what was being referred to while listening to some lectures by Alan Watts during my recent sabbatical from burnout.
He was able to explain the differences between eastern and western philosophy in a way that made me see things in a completely different light. It was like waking up from the matrix.
Since then, I've been constantly aware of the constructed nature of reality and have had to re-evaluate many of my assumptions. For example, just learning that words are just abstractions and don't always accurately reflect reality was something I had never considered before. Now I try to be more careful with my word selection, but nobody's prefect :)
I think using a word like the matrix in a strict sense when it comes from a movie about just about all the evocative ideas in Western thought is ludicrous. It's pedanticism on steroids.
For example, currently playing a golf simulator is a little like the movie 28 days later. The simulation is amazing, but the vibe is an empty barren world. AI could generate crowd chatter and interaction, just as if one was playing in front of a real crowd of opiniated, semi-informed and possible semi-drunk patrons.
You can rope friends in too, but it would be amazing to only need a couple of friends to play with but still feel like the whole world was populated.
What would be used as the training set though? All that player input is long gone.
The space of possible interesting videogame experiences, even involving old videogames, just expanded.
Or even "don't leave the town or you'll be attacked by bears" or "your job is to stand in this building and let the player character shoot you with a gun".
I wonder if article titles will never again be factual or even correlate with the article text
Not at Ticketmaster prices.
Future if entertainment is going to be wild.
How depressing that’s sounds. Kind of like cheap cattle feed or something.
Are you only here to be entertained?
I’d like to contribute that music is not just entertainment. One of the best, and accessible, books on the subject was recently The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan.
What ever happened to automating the boring things? Instead we’re hearing thousands of software developers celebrating what they perceive as the end of art (it’s not, sorry, just mass noise being injected into human communication). If only it was done with a little more discourse and less blind superiority then we might have something to talk about. This is the saddest trend in some time.
Let’s go back to automating our taxes. Leave playing and writing music for all the time we create for ourselves instead.
That was once the promise.
Personally, yes. I'm counting down the days until we have the movie from Infinite Jest.
And yes, absolutely, I know people who would cut off parts of themselves (or others) to get to their phone, after a period of deprivation.
GP said "for the masses."
Popular media is just that: Cattle feed. It doesn't really matter if the next Marvel movie or the next Drake song is AI generated as long as it has its intended effect.
Do we need unrestrained, automated more of that? Or should we leave art to do what it does best: nurture the soul and wake people from their sedated dream-like lives and into lives more conscious and more fully-lived?
Drowning art in noise is going to have resounding effects on society. Cutting people off even further from their own souls is heinous. Doing so wittingly is nothing short of evil.
Back in my day (not really) you could get a job as a live musician, performing at restaurants, cafes, and and lots of other places. Then, suddenly, people started to install record machines and buy music from record companies! So, you know, AI-generated music is just a progression of a centuries-old trend.
Quite ironically, this might be the disaster that causes the labels to license their libraries on more flexible terms to a larger variety of players, thus liberating the world from the current streaming service oligopoly.
How long before we get back to some modern version of "key signing parties," in which you check how many layers of "Humans you reasonably trust to verify that other people are humans" are between you and some chunk of content?
And crypto finds a real-world application!
(I didn't make this up, Gibson did with Neuromancer in the 80s)
Yeah, if you are a record company, this must feel like the Rapture.
Imo we’re fucking up pretty hard, it’s interesting technology but I don’t think people realise that we’re all going to be “the record labels” soon.
Imo it’s worse that most of the good works generated are based off peoples hard work. People used to complain when China would steal IP from the USA and sell it at a discounted price…this is going to make that look like a joke haha every single person on this forum will be effected too, don’t think you won’t be.
Just because we can do things doesn’t necessarily mean we should keep doing them, using massive datasets that people innocently uploaded to the internet then reproduce works that will make them poorer is kind of, shit ?
And in the meantime, a generation of people who didn't grow up in that world will fall victim to forgeries of a quality they cannot conceive of.
I get this sounds hyperbolic but I really don’t see how the internet can continue like this. Like personally, if I was an artist, writer or musician I’d be never releasing any works online ever again. Sure people can get around that but like, I’d be making it harder to steal my stuff.
This is probably the moment when the internet is no longer “cool” and just starts to get weird.
I’m already becoming much much much more suspicious of the internet and even starting to question online forming participation, I have no idea if the comments section is real people or generated content made to influence people. It’s really turning me off cyberspace.
The onlines will live in their feedback chamber of AI generated content to stoke their ego and convince them they're 100% right and wise and, you know, you can express how right and wise you are to others if you buy this product. The same thing we have now, just turned up to about 50 on the 0-10 dial.
The offlines will interact mostly with other humans in person, and dismiss the concerns of the online world, and... pretty much act like humans have throughout history, for good and for bad.
The problem is that the online world takes an awful lot of resources and energy we seem to be getting pretty short on (at least if you want it reliable enough to run a datacenter), so that world has some endpoint, eventually.
If you are a genuine new talent, the next Hendrix, then you'll have unique content to offer, and maybe things will be even brighter for you sa you stand out above a soup of algorthmic sameness.
But if you're a cookie cutter muso who mainly derives from other people's stuff then yeah, might be time to find a new gig (to make money at anyway).
If his further work can do easily be extended, it’s commodity. Valuable. But not artistic.
That can still happen in a world of AI... but on the other hand, maybe music isnt the strong message carrier that it used to be.
Implying everyone except an extraordinary rare talent is essentially worthless anyway is quite a take.
The issue with AI art isn't just what it can do, but how insanely fast it is at it. It can start copying you before you have even finished your art piece and it can produce new ones 1000x faster than you, in your style. It already can produce images faster than you can view them and generate text faster than you can read. An AI-Spotify that just streams endless amount of AI music, custom written specifically for you, might not be far away.
And that's not going to be the end of it, the next step would be generating unique content from scratch, since AI can be trained on what people are listening too and than predict what might be the next trending thing.
I really don't see how one can compete with that as a singular artist in the long run. Some big companies might survive by being the ones that run those AI models, but the individual artist will have so much competition that they won't even be noticed in the first place.
Anyway others have said, it wouldn’t matter his music would now be copied in seconds and he wouldn’t get paid to continue.
It IS very impressive for the technical accomplishment of just how much it sounds like Drake & The Weekend.
I think 15 million people have listened to it for that reason—to marvel at the likeness of artists they know like a digital audio wax museum.
I think it will be important for artists to be able to copyright their appearance & sound; their visual & auditory identities.
It is now. That the labels reacted like so. They’ve shown it’s great, or the king has no clothes.
The technology is extraordinary, and there’s the possibility that it keeps going well past human ability.
And the hype is there.
But that doesn’t make it a good song by human musician standards.
And yeah, it's good enough. I cleaned my apartment to it. Works as intended.
With song copyright, for example, the gold standard has been 'is the melody the same'.
How do you define a voice specifically enough to copyright?
What if some dude just happens to sound like Drake, because he won the punnet square of larynxes? Is his work now a copyright violation?
What if he sounds like Drake when he puts on the Drake filter? Did the Drake filter violate copyright? Does his voice violate copyright only when filtered?
The people deciding these questions are not philosophers of sound. They're lawyers and industry hacks. It's going to get messy.
The last videos of Alison Goldfrapp using AI are interesting at least, putting strange textures where they aren't expected.
But the phrase “AI generated song” implies more than just the voices.
Anyone have a non-clickbait source which provides more details?
edit: wow, if your link (i.e. the song) was AI-derived (and thus not-copyrightable) then I am gd speechless. Smooth background, great vocals — lyrics too, of course — but wowsers, my tenant was just realizing that "the AI shit you been talking non-stop about is actually real: DRAKE is upset, shit is crazy!"
So, that and this and these are interesting datapoints upon insanity.timeline.
Sure, but who cares? All it needs to do is take away the good bit.
Also, the example of radio is telling. Radio destroyed musicianship as a career. Before the gods of rock and roll, there were tavern fiddlers, and now we don't even need the gods anymore. A classic example of ever-greater concentration of capital.
Most existing music is 4/4 too for starters because it is club-oriented, tons of other underexplored time signatures. If what you said was true then scores for picture and games wouldn't be so innovative.
I had a few late friends who pioneered never-before-seen technologies, for which the tools created whole new genres.
People said the same shit decades ago. Smacks of naivety.
Everyone is tired of the gated walls of the music industry and this will only result in a rally behind AI even if AI itself becomes problematic in the end.
"Where is the value in AI creativity? Does it actually create anything? What can be said of artistic works in which the creation was essentially a series of playing at the lottery of the machine until something fantastic emerges? Spinning the wheel of chance and instead of red, black or some number, it is a series of lexical phrases with which we hope to catch the spinning ball on the Roulette and award us a work of art." - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
If you replace "Popular Music" with "Anything Else" (e.g. software engineering, standardized examination) you might see the silliness of your statement.
using AI to generate such hits is only the next step. cheap to produce and the rest is marketing