A bunch of 200 musicians signed an open letter calling on tech corporations and developers to not undermine human creativity with AI music generation tools.
The list of undersigned artists is so power-packed and wide-ranging that it could make for an awesome Coachella lineup — it features Billie Eilish, the Bob Marley estate, Chappell Roan, Elvis Costello, Greta Van Fleet, Imagine Dragons, Jon Bon Jovi, the Jonas Brothers, Kacey Musgraves, Katy Perry, Mac DeMarco, Miranda Lambert, Mumford & Sons, Nicki Minaj, Noah Kahan, Pearl Jam, Sheryl Crow and Zayn Malik, amongst others.
“When used irresponsibly, AI poses enormous threats to our ability to guard our privacy, our identities, our music and our livelihoods,” the letter reads. “A few of the biggest and strongest corporations are, without permission, using our work to coach AI models. … For a lot of working musicians, artists and songwriters who are only attempting to make ends meet, this might be catastrophic.”
These artists are right. The AI models that generate latest music, artwork and writing function by training on massive datasets of existing work, and normally, asking to remove your work from these models is a futile exercise. It will be as if one among these artists tried to stop anyone from pirating their music — it’s just not realistic. It’s already possible to make convincing deepfakes of popular artists, and the tech will only keep recovering.
Some corporations like Adobe and Stability AI are working on AI music generators that use licensed or royalty-free music. But even these tools could negatively impact artists who make scores for TV commercials or other beats that an artist might license for his or her work.
Historically, musicians have gotten the short end of the stick as tech gets increasingly sophisticated. First, it was file-sharing that made it easy to get music at no cost; streaming emerged as the reply for that issue, however it’s not one which’s satisfied artists. The Union of Musicians and Allied Staff (UMAW) has spent years working to secure higher streaming payouts for artists — the artists within the guild estimate that Spotify’s average streaming royalty rate is about $0.0038, or a couple of fourth of a cent. So it is smart that musicians remain skeptical of this emerging technology.
Authors have also taken a stand against the rise of generative AI. In July, over 15,000 writers — including James Patterson, Michael Chabon, Suzanne Collins, Roxane Gay and others — signed the same open letter, addressed to the CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM and Microsoft.
“These technologies mimic and regurgitate our language, stories, style, and concepts. Tens of millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays, and poetry provide the ‘food’ for AI systems, infinite meals for which there was no bill,” the authors’ letter reads.
But these tech corporations aren’t listening. You’ll be able to still go on ChatGPT and ask it to churn out a passage within the form of Margaret Atwood — it’s not necessarily good, however it does indicate that the massive language model has ingested “The Handmaid’s Tale” and might spit out a degraded version of it. And since copyright law isn’t necessarily sophisticated enough to deal with generative AI, legal recourse is pretty useless at this point.
“This assault on human creativity should be stopped,” the musicians’ letter says. “We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal skilled artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem.”
