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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I mentioned this in the thread about the RIAA getting worked up over this:

Should that be illegal, as long as the result isn't described as being the real person? To repeat my analogy, say I want to cover Guns N' Roses. I can hire a guitarist that could copy Slash's guitar parts (but can't say it's Slash playing them). Is that fundamentally different from getting an AI to sing Axl's vocals (as long as I don't say it's the real Axl singing)? It feels different, somehow, but I'm not sure that's philosophically defensible.

Help me think this through. Why are AI replicas that don't claim to be the original different from a cover band or an impressionist?

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Thinking out loud, I think the governing aspect of this is fidelity. Cover bands, and impressionist are always going to be delta away from the original. Current-gen replicas can pass the generic test of "is this indistinguishable from the original by laymen?".

This gets especially messy with movie actors. Specifically -several extremely high-profile movie actors _specialize_ in the sort of roles they take to project a certain persona, and be _the_ guy for that role. It's also known within producer circles, that a single actor can move the sales needle +-~$X0M revenues; which is part of their valueprop. Present-gen replica tech poses an existential risk both for brand building, and exclusivity of these actors.

Just doing a little googling, it looks like cover bands actually so need to license their songs, or the venue does, and if they want to record their covers they need a license for that as well.

That’s a compulsory license, though. If you pay the fee, you’re allowed to play the music.

That seems more like a “let’s not sweat the small stuff” type decision to me. It seems like exactly the sort of decision that would have to be revisited if huge industries got built on AI.

I mean, ultimately if you had a “virtual musician” that could do “live performances” of any cover with 100% fidelity on demand while running on your phone, I think we wouldn’t treat that like a human cover band. Doing so would just kill off the idea of music IP (which, I’m definitely not going to defend the current mess that is IP law, but people have been arguing about it for a long time, so I suspect we as a society won’t just toss it out now).

It also occurred to me while writing this that this sort of virtual musician wouldn’t even really be like a cover band, because they don’t even play at a venue. They play just for you. I suspect there are no laws, at least being enforced, that cover what sort of songs a musician can play in private, in their friends’ houses. So, I think this is really going to break our intuition.

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