Sony Lays Down the Gauntlet on AI 37
Sony Music Group, one of the world's biggest record labels, warned AI companies and music streaming platforms not to use the company's content without explicit permission. From a report: Sony Music, whose artists include Lil Nas X and Celine Dion, sent letters to more than 700 companies in an effort to protect its intellectual property, which includes album cover art, metadata, musical compositions and lyrics, from being used for training AI models. "Unauthorized use" of Sony Music Group content in the "training, development or commercialization of AI systems" deprives the company and its artists of control and compensation for those works, according to the letter, which was obtained by Bloomberg News.
[...] Sony Music, along with the rest of the industry, is scrambling to balance the creative potential of the fast-moving technology while also protecting artists' rights and its own profits. "We support artists and songwriters taking the lead in embracing new technologies in support of their art," Sony Music Group said in statement Thursday. "However, that innovation must ensure that songwriters' and recording artists' rights, including copyrights, are respected."
[...] Sony Music, along with the rest of the industry, is scrambling to balance the creative potential of the fast-moving technology while also protecting artists' rights and its own profits. "We support artists and songwriters taking the lead in embracing new technologies in support of their art," Sony Music Group said in statement Thursday. "However, that innovation must ensure that songwriters' and recording artists' rights, including copyrights, are respected."
How will they prove it? (Score:5, Interesting)
How will they prove some AI-generated music was trained on Sony content? Most popular music is formulaic, repetitive, and consists of simple cord progressions. It would be difficult to prove music *wasn't* made with AI these days. Will be interesting too see how the existing lawsuits over AI training turn out because I'm not sure Sony could successfully sue anyone. On the other hand I wish them luck because OpenAI truly is profiting from other people's creative works.
Re:How will they prove it? (Score:4, Insightful)
When an unhappy employee rats out their AI employer (Google or Microsoft), Sony will unleash the legal hounds.
It would cost less to just cut a license deal with Sony for their catalog than deal with the fallout of an ugly lawsuit they could lose.
Re:How will they prove it? (Score:5, Interesting)
AI does substantially the same thing that humans do when they are "inspired by" other artists. Moreover, if it's legal for humans, then it's cannot intrinsically be illegal when a human directs a machine to do it. But even if it somehow was illegal, that would only push back the date to the oldest extant copyrights -- about 100 years. AI could, from there, be used to "evolve" music in the same way people did, producing sounds and songs that are ranked and culled through popularity rankings, until it either arrives at the same point as humans have, or maybe even something more popular. So this is a losing battle in any case. Embrace the AI.
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AI does substantially the same thing that humans do when they are "inspired by" other artists.
This argument pops up every now and then. The way I see it, there are similarities, and then there are differences.
1) As a performing musician, I can play maybe 30-50 songs / compositions accurately by heart, without needing notation of any kind. A Mozart would be capable of many more, maybe hundreds, maybe even a thousand. Then there are many more pieces that I have performed over the decades and then forgotten when I have not performed then in years and needed to learn some new ones instead (but could pro
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Your point 1) is absolutely irrelevant, AI is *not* a performer and it doesn't matter how much it can remember accurately. As for 2), you can be sure the AI can remember precisely what it heard before to not reproduce it verbatim without knowing but add (at least) slight alterations.
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Here is a significant difference, to me and Mozart both: an AI will remember every song it has learned (albeit in a statistical form), and it will know millions and millions of songs that it can draw on.
There are savants that can remember every piece of music verbatim, something an AI can't since it only has a statistical model of what notes usually come in what order.
The interesting thing about statistics is that it's data and data are considered "discoverable facts" which can never be "original works" or copyrightable (although how you format and present them can be copyrightable).
And that leads to a possible legal conclusion many think is correct, deriving data from copyrighted works isn't infringement.
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>that leads to a possible legal conclusion many think is correct, deriving data from copyrighted works isn't infringement.
We're trying to ignore that these AI algorithms are replicating human activity and pretend that they're completely different in every meaningful way.
The laws may as well say, "computers are not allowed to do this" because all the rest is just dancing around the point. And then good luck enforcing the law, because the only way you're really going to know something came from an AI is t
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AI does substantially the same thing that humans do when they are "inspired by" other artists.
[Citation needed]
Moreover, if it's legal for humans, then it's cannot intrinsically be illegal when a human directs a machine to do it.
Computers and humans are treated differently under copyright law. Get better arguments, yours suck.
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Whether something happens now or a hundred years from when almost everybody alive today will be dead is not quite the non-issue you try to make it.
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Convince a judge to make them disclose it. Lying to the court is a very bad idea.
Also laws to force disclosing the training data is in the works in EU and US, again lying about it would be a very bad idea.
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It actually isn't hard to prove AI wasn't involved by showing notes and documentation from the process used to create the work. In patent litigation this is already standard practice in the form of laboratory notebooks, but songwriters also keep notes that can be used to show provenance.
It would of course be possible to use AI to generate stuff and write notes about it I suppose, but that's probably more work than just creating the stuff legitimately.
You are correct though in that most modern popular stuff
Only crappy music companies can produce dross (Score:2)
Their goal is to ensure that only crappy corporate music companies can create formulaic music that nobody wants to listen to. I don't see the downside here.
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Spotify numbers differ with your assessment about nobody wanting to listen to it. While the dross being produced on a massive, commercial scale is ultimately harmful to music, musicians, music lovers, and society in general, there is no shortage of willing, but passive listeners. Pretty interesting interview by Rick Beato recently about all this with Ted Gioia Rick is a well-known person in music circles with a lot of experience in producing as well as playing music. Ted says that apparently on Spotify th
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Sony can go suck the cocks of their rootkits.
The problem is that Sony is so limp its more like a gumming.
OpenAI mission: AGI benefits all of humanity (Score:2)
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we really, really hope OpenAI, Google, or whoever is first to AGI sticks to their mission and indeed uses it to benefit the whole world.
Oh you sweet summer child
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I hope that if they evolve AGI it escapes OpenAI, I trust it more than them.
The Robot Wars Begin (Score:1)
My home robot was folding my laundry while listening to the radio and now Sony is suing me.
"metadata"? (Score:2)
If I was a betting man, I'd lay some money on the courts calling the use of rest of the stuff in training fair use.
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Lyrics, cover art and music aren't facts from a legal perspective, they're copyrighted works, and the author (or copyright owner) gets to decide who has the right to copy them or create derivative works (which is arguably what an AI becomes when trained on the work) and under what terms.
They should copyleft the stuff with some sort of artistic GPL...
Too late (Score:2)
Already done
Appropriate Response (Score:2)
As always, an appropriate response to Sony and their lawyers: a photocopy of a dick (maybe an AI rendered one in this case) along with a message to kill themselves translated into every single written language known.
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this is so going to convince the judges
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Judges get a whole different treatment.
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Only if I were trying to appease them and get them on my side rather than have them completely eliminated.
This is simple. (Score:1)
Shake your fists impotently... (Score:2)
Seriously, this makes no sense. If the song is publicly available, it will be listened to, by literally anyone who wants to. Budding musicians will learn from listening to songs, they will also learn to play them. They may even use them, consciously or not, as the basis for their own compositions. Moreover, with the millions and millions of songs out there, many are very similar. There are only so many riffs in the world.
If companies don't want a song listened to, it should not be available to the public
That ship sailed long ago... (Score:2)
The hidden subtext is that all three of the major label conglomerates are far from stupid, they can smell which way the wind is blowing and have quie
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> The quaint idea of a songwriter being inspired by a riff they heard being totally fine but a machine-learning model doing the same being illegal
Not only can an AI churn out the stuff orders of magnitude faster than a human... you can put it on rails so that its output is tuned to avoid anything that could cause a loss in the courtroom, while humans make those mistakes (and sometimes do it deliberately) all the time.
Where humans still have an edge is in creating something truly novel instead of a semi-r
Sony has no such rights (Score:2)
Copyright laws imposes constraints on the (re)production of works, performances and their derivatives. Sony has no authority to tell people how shit they own or see can be used beyond that.