Tennessee becomes the first state to protect musicians against AI
npr.org
npr.org
[1]Yes, I know it's a Tracy Chapman song.
I don't think so. It amends previous protections preventing folks from using an artist's likeness to include voice. I don't think you could, for instance, create a TV commercial using someone's image and simply label it as AI to get around those protections.
The whole point of the law is to protect the likeness of a person. If you can just slap a label on it that would make it pointless.
An AI generated song, I would argue, is not really "creative" in the same sense. It's not even really a cover. It's a generated output built on the original IP to a degree that is well beyond human capacity because it's not human at all. It's machine generation and not artistic creation. People like to conflate the two, but they're being wilfully ignorant of the clear differences between the two. Prompting an AI model to output something is not the same thing as making it oneself. The only human element of an AI song is the prompt and not the output.
It's more likely that an AI song should and will be treated in the same way as clearing a sample in hip-hop, for example, even though it's also different in important ways.
I'd argue against that. A lot of "serious" AI art isn't just throw a prompt and you're done. There's additional editing on top of that (of course content aware fill isn't AI because...reasons). And even then, have you seen prompts for really good stuff? Those are def not one shot things, and are a creative process in itself. It's annoying honestly, since I'm rarely ever able to get images that are as good as I've seen.
"That's not REAL music." I changed schools, eventually changed majors.. but now the place that rejected my computer now has a "music technology" degree.
editing to say that music that wasn't real went on to be a massive genre - hard to put "creativity / art" in a box.
You brought up AI visual art, and used the word "editing" to describe what happens after the image is generated from the prompt. I think that's a very important distinction --- between creating an image or work of art by your own hand (yes even in something like Illustrator or digital art tools because people like to erroneously conflate those with AI image generation) and editing the output of an AI model. I would argue the same happens in a DAW with an AI song.
> And even then, have you seen prompts for really good stuff? Those are def not one shot things, and are a creative process in itself. It's annoying honestly, since I'm rarely ever able to get images that are as good as I've seen.
I have, hence why the prompts are the human and actually artistic part of AI art. You need to be creative to actually create a prompt that uses AI model well and skillfully. They honestly read like bizarre modernist or formalist poetry.
Extending the government-enabled monopoly power of the establishment media to prevent new art, technology and creativity from competing should not be treated as a good thing or as "protecting" them.
Rather than extending copyright to unprecedented new levels to strangle AI in the crib, we should be overjoyed that billions of people will now be enabled to use new tools to create art, music, poetry, and literature tailored to their specific desires.
We could be on the cusp of a new utopia, of empowerment of the average person and incredibly diversity of the creative arts... or we could watch as a handful of corporations get laws passed to give their cartel exclusive control of what music, film, art and literature gets published.
Great so some John Lennon songs will be “protected” … despite his lack of being alive.
They are all fully aligned and share the goal of “strangling AI in the crib” as you eloquently put it. It’s going to happen, too, nationwide, because we always seem to give these Media Landlords outsized political power.
No this is terrible for the purposes of propagandists. We live on human-farms and are managed by our governments and technocratic elite, through propaganda and incentive systems which increase in violent coerciveness the more we assert our individual sovereignties. You never signed that social contract you're following. The magic of the Magi is in control of the human psyche, the magic is in the last mile to human awareness. That knowledge has been passed down for millennia through esoteric occult teachings. I digress.
Propagandists must be able to serve their content without competing counterinforcements. You being able to generate your own porn privately with complete creative sovereignty (assuming a morally "flat" bias model) will destroy almost all avenues the propagandist has to influence your local sexual kink progressions (progressively slippery slope from vanilla college co-ed softcore towards slap porn or cuck porn). Porn too far fetched? How about being able to write reams of coherent novels with whatever the reader believed to be right and just? No amount of post-OWS woke identity politics propaganda (paid for by Wall Street, to take the OWS heat off them) can counter the sheer volume of counterinforcement autists like myself could churn out.
One benefit to the propagandists: people will probably atomize as our social protocols decay from lack of authentic critical feedback, as we all increasingly huff our own generated supplies.
They aren't creating anything of the sort. The AI is creating it for them, and not to their specific styles, to a rough approximation based on the work of existing human artists that already exist in its data set.
Look at the Sora AI video generate from the prompt "an alien blending in naturally with new york city, paranoia thriller style, 35mm film"[0]. It's awful, particularly in its rendition of the background, and misses on almost every element of what one can assume the intent behind the prompt was. No actual cinematographer would intentionally make this.
And billions of people? Sorry? On what planet do billions of people have access to AI but not the tools and opportunity to create art on their own? Ugandans with $200 made a movie enjoyed by people the world over[1], every second of which has far more heart and actual creative value than anything AI could generate. AI isn't liberating anyone from anything, it's shackling people to centralized, corporate generators of mediocrity.
Listen while you still can
If that's a bad thing, then you're praising them for not being that way this time, right? Or are you criticizing them for not living up to your negative expectations?
Edit: Oh, I think I got it now. You're saying that normally right-leaning libertarianism is a bad thing, but in this case it would be a good thing. Doesn't that mean you're compromising your principles?
If the owner never had the thing, it is theft, but subject and target are reversed (actions taken against me for money I never gave you are stealing money from me). This could be considered protectionism, but also extortion.
The actual wrong is people taking adverse action against you based on fabricated evidence. Is creating such fabricated evidence with the intent to induce adverse action also wrong? I would say so. It seems similar to defamation or libel to me, unless there is a clear element of parody.
[1] https://www.tpr.org/government-politics/2022-08-30/texas-law...
It could be argued that using AI to duplicate someone’s voice is a form of theft. I can’t think of any Libertarians who think the government shouldn’t have laws around theft.
Suppose they’re identical twins.
AI can’t be a free-for-all and I’m perfectly fine with what Tennessee is doing here.
It’s the stated Libertarian position that I have questions on.
Even so, I think there are some existing laws around such things, and I think such acts need to pay royalties in some form. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, to be honest.
Regardless, no actual Libertarian position was presented in the article. The comment I responded to was making a dig at Libertarians and the State of Kentucky.
Even though I find a lot of Libertarians abrasive and that their ideology is incompatible with actual governance, I still like to analyze how they think. My goal was to provide a perspective on why a Libertarian might be okay with such a law.
You’re narrowing the issue of ownership by method of construction/reproduction.
But isn’t the issue and violation of ownership really about making forgeries: That is, claiming to be what it isn’t?
What’s novel then is that AI just made it incredibly easy to create forgeries of IP.
I'm not a country music fan, I hate the music. But I lived down there for about 5 years and it's amazing how many incredible musicians live there. You can walk down the street and it won't take long to find some musician just singing for cash putting on a professional level performance. I can't state it strongly enough, just jaw droppingly good musicians. Playing for friggin quarters and dollars.
It probably has more to do with the music economy which is massive in Nashville than any political ideal. I'm not sure that's protectionism, seems like common sense. They'd be stupid _not_ to do this.
There's a relatively small market for live music, small market for widely-distributed new artists, and a never-ending supply of kids with a passion for music who will dedicate themselves to it.
It's not like "very right of center libertarian type state" is the Tennessee state motto or something, it's just a label you've attached for your own convenience in online debates and at dinner parties. That this action seems incongruent to your image of Tennesee is a sign that your stereotype is shallow and incorrect, not that Tennnessee is hypocritical.
I making observations based on personal observations, not simply to make a point. I don't know where you're from or where you live, but I assure you I'm not making stereotypes, this is just what I've noticed from talking to my neighbors and members of the community.
I'm sure my viewpoint will become more nuanced as I continue to learn more, but I don't think I'm that off kilter here in saying that economically Tennessee (especially East Tennessee, maybe Nashville is different) leans more libertarian than a lot of places in the country.
Actual right wing libertarianism looks a lot like New Hampshire. Their motto is “Live Free or Die”. They’re the only state without a seatbelt law - even though that means giving up on federal highway money.
Good on them, but we need to do more: we need to prohibit the commercial sale of AI-generated art as well. What about combining 2-3 voices in a new voice? It should be prohbibited. And training on all human-made media needs to be banned also.
Sure it makes sense for a music center like Nashville to do this, but for the entire rest of the world? You can't block them from the source material without destroying the entire industry. So you'll just move the generation elsewhere. To be fair humans have "sounding like" each other down to their vocal tics since time immemorial.
You could label (secret key, ledger, hash) legitimate artist recordings and then just shame unmarked (illegitimate) ones. I'm not even sure you could get a national law to "protect the owner", but unless you get rid of the internet you're not going to enforce it effectively. All you can do is reduce its profitability.
But I dunno really. The IP or copyright in it self does not seem that important compared to like, "networking" of the sales people and trust in that shit gets done at B2B level. I mean people still pays for Office and Windows even though free as in freedom and beer alternatives exist.
Book authors would be screwed. I admit that.
Go ahead -- make your rules, pass your laws, drive it underground. Throw the rabbit right smack-dab into the middle of that briar patch.
(Yes, I know, don't feed the trolls...)
You're right. Companies would need to implement draconian "content attribution systems" to scan all creative works to ensure no training data was derived from copyrighted sources.
This could result in a "chilling effect" where creators self-censor for fear of their original works being flagged as infringing simply due to incidental similarities. Because now we have to scan every human work, as it might have been generated with AI.
It opens up the prospect of expensive litigation over subconscious inspiration or vague resemblances to prior works.
Taken to the extreme, it could hamper creativity and innovation by making any new work legally risky to publish if AI analysis deems it too "similar" to something else.
I'm as anti-AI as anyone, and most AI generated content is laughably inferior to the real thing, gross and vapid and dehumanizing, but I feel like training on human-made media is fine so long as it's voluntary, the rights of the author or artist are respected, and they're compensated for their effort.
Of course, that would mean retaining human employees and paying them as artists and designing the workflow of AI around making them more productive, instead of firing them all for prompt engineers or Turkers for pennies on the dollar, which would make AI less profitable than it could possibly be, which is why it will never happen.