Major record labels sue AI music generators: human creativity on trial

[godofwealth]

As I’ve remarked previously on WBF, generative AI is coming for the music industry, whether you like it or not. If you watched The Playlist on Netflix on the decades long struggle to create the streaming industry by the pioneer Daniel Ek of Spotify, we are at the cusp of a far bigger revolution.

Generative AI will make today’s streaming software look like buggy whips or floppy disk drives compared to Tesla EVs or NVME drives. This lawsuit harkens the beginning of what will be a decades long fight to save human creativity. It’s a small part of a much bigger struggle to preserve human creativity. It’s not a question of if, but when. Your children and grandchildren are far more likely to listen to AI generated music than they will be to old-fashioned human generated music. Generative AI systems trained on billions of albums can create novel music that may exceed human creative abilities.

Major Record Labels Sue A.I. Music Generators

The lawsuits say that Udio and Suno trained their products on reams of copyrighted music.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Ground Control]

I don’t think it is possible for AI to replace human generated music anymore than it can replace a good companion.

 

[godofwealth]

Yes, as someone who’s worked in AI for the past 40 years, I’d have agreed with you. But I think a lot of in the field have been stunned by the rapid pace of improvements in the past few years. We don’t have good intuition on what billions of dollars of compute power can produce given access to the entire corpus of human creativity in all its forms (text, art, music etc.). It’s safe to say that none of us at this stage can tell for sure if an image, a news story, or a poem came from a human mind or from a machine. Take this recent article in NY Times on restaurant reviews. Humans could t tell they were generated from AI. Take it from me that in a few years AI generated music may be as good as anything that humans can produce. Yes, it’s coming.

Ultimately what is creativity? It’s a product of a human brain. We have one hundred billion neurons. Machines are going to have more compute power at some point. They’ll have access to more data than any human can read or hear in a thousand lifetimes.

The Chef Is Human. The Reviewer Isn’t.

A new study showed people real restaurant reviews and ones produced by A.I. They couldn’t tell the difference.

www.nytimes.com

 

[steve williams]

anyone heard The Sound Of Silence by The Ghost of Johnny Cash...a perfect example......one of the best songs played in several rooms at THE Show in Costa Mesa a few weeks ago...totally caught me off guard and lit up my ears

 

[treitz3]

That's scary.

Tom

 

[godofwealth]

Think of the following scenario that is realizable with today’s AI technology. You sit down for an evening of music. Rather than select an album or track — oh, how old fashioned — you talk to your music streamer. You say “.today I’d like to listen to what Beethoven might have written if he had heard jazz music”. Rather than old-fashioned Roon Radio, your streamer generates an infinitely varying amount of novel music that’s tailored to the evening and your listening.styles. As the evening goes into night, the music will get gentler and perhaps more conducive to giving you a good nights sleep. You are the Master and Commander. No more pesky copyrights to worry about. No more ASCAP. Just an infinite supply of new music of any genre you sent. Want to hear what The Beatles might have composed had they not broken up? Coming right up. It’s hard to say that this will not be popular. It might put old fashioned streaming companies out of business.

Forty years ago u bought my first film camera, a Nikon FE-2. If you had told me then that Kodak would go bankrupt, I’d have laughed. Yet that’s exactly what happened. You might not realize it yet, but right now Google is in the fight of its life, and the smart money on the street in the Bay Area is that they might not survive the transition from todays internet to tomorrows generative AI web. We are seeing a generational shift in technology happen. Like Kodak and Nokia, the old stalwarts generally don’t survive.

 

[steve williams]

anyone heard The Sound Of Silence by The Ghost of Johnny Cash...a perfect example......one of the best songs played in several rooms at THE Show in Costa Mesa a few weeks ago...totally caught me off guard and lit up my ears

I heard it in several rooms, first in Ken Songer's room with his field coil speaker. I was reading something when the track started and immediately I recognized the first few introductory chords of the song and then suddenly Johnny Cash was in the room singing the song and I almost fell off my seat. I went up to Ken after and asked him what Johnny Cash album was that as it was as good a version as Paul Simon sings . When he told me art was sung by an unknown elderly singer who used AI to do the voice of Johnny Cash I was gobsmacked as I swore it was Johnny Cash

 

[steve williams]

Have listen and tell me if it isn'tJohnny Cash......

 

[RCanelas]

This is possibly the most dystopian scenario I can dream of, and I'm a fan of dystopian fiction.

I truly hope the record labels and the artists win this one, but that is likely wishful thinking. So long music, we had a good run.

 

[hopkins]

I'm not worried about AI when it comes to music. Sure, some people will listen to AI generated music. There's already a lot of music on streaming services which is "generic", so what's the difference?

Johnny Cash is dead, his catalog is known. If a new song comes up, it will be easy for those who care to determine whether it's an "official" release of a previously unissued track. Those who manage his estate will have more incentive to publicize those "official" releases.

If we are talking about entirely new music, it's the end result that counts. I don't really care how it was made. But I think it will be hard for AI to be truly "creative".

 

[hopkins]

And concerning that Johnny Cash video, it's easy to say after the fact, but the video did not fool me.

Compare ..

It's little things, sometimes imperfections, that give character to a musician's performance, and trigger in us an emotional response.

How could AI ever replicate something as subtle and creative as this?

It's just a personal example, but I am sure each and every one of you has their own favorite performers and will understand what I'm saying.