The Recording Industry Association of America wants Discord to close a server in which users generate AI deepfake tracks mimicking famous musicians

This is just one action in a coming conflict. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Does the record industry win and digital likenesses become outlawed, even taboo? Or does voice, appearance etc just become another sets of rights that musicians will have to negotiate during a record deal?

  • artificial_unintelligence@programming.devEnglish
    40·
    1 year ago

    This will definitely be setting some precedent on how AI music is treated. I’m on the side of the monkey with a camera and that anything made by these large models is public domain. I’m sure these record companies would be ecstatic if they could license an artists voice without having to have them sing anything new

    • Catsrules@lemmy.mlEnglish
      12·
      1 year ago

      Hopefully that is how it goes down. That precedent has already been set for images at least for text generated images.

      Unfortunately the music industry has alot of money to throw at lawyers and i could seen an argument that this is a little bit different if your directly using someone’s likeness like a voice.

        • Catsrules@lemmy.mlEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          Maybe but I would argue everything you said has already happened many times over. People were probably saying the same thing when cameras were invented. Because why would a people sit for hours waiting for a painter to paint them when they can sit for 30 seconds for a photograph to get taken. That arguably is a more accurate representation.

          Or how about computer animation. I am sure many artist lost their job during that switch over as well as computers could just figure out the in between frames instead of a person manually having to draw frame by frame.

          But artists have adapted over the years and now we have entirely new forms of artist like 3D animators and photographers. Even game designers. YouTube Thumbnail creators, ad designers, drone operators etc…etc… Artistes have more way to create art then ever before and have more way to monetize their art. More importantly normal people have more time to consume art then ever before to the point It is almost becoming a problem.

          I really don’t see AI as being any different. Sure I am sure it will drastically change the industry and if artist don’t adapt they will be in trouble but that is nothing new. It has happened many times before and will happen many more times in the future. But in every case I would say art has become better each time technology has advanced.

            • Catsrules@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Right, this is what people always say about AI art, but they are never specific about what that adaptation would even look like in this case.

              Why not just a new tool for artist to use? Sure it will replace artists in some scenarios and it will enable less artistically adept people. But I look at how it is used in Photoshop you select a section and tell the AI what to replace and it does and you do a little bit of cleanup to make it presentable. But end of the day I think you will always need some artistic vision in the majority of cases to tell the AI what you want it to do. If you give the AI tools to an average person vs an artist the artist would be far superior every time.

              Artists themselves don’t need AI, they can just make the art themselves This only benefits non-artists who want to exploit the skill that goes into creating art, without actually acknowledging the intrinsic link between art and the human being creating it.

              Does a photo editor really want to spend 3 hours removing aunt Beth obliviously photo bombing the bride and groom’s wedding photo? When they could just use AI and be done in 10 minutes? Or how about an artist using some AI art as a starting off point or some inspiration to start their own creation.

              That is how I see AI, a very powerful tool in an artist toolbox.

              It will work for a while, but without actual human beings inputting content for the AI, it will dead end. A cotton gin doesn’t still need the cotton pickers to still keep picking cotton for it to fulfill its function, an AI will still need the artists though.

              Your assuming all Human created art will stop. I seriously doubt that will ever happen, if anything I see it increasing as AI will help Humans create art faster.

              I don’t think AI is like other inventions and advancements, it’s something that human beings and society at large are really not mentally equipped to deal with, even the people designing it don’t understand the ramifications of what they’re doing.

              I don’t think I would say humans were really ready for the electricity, Nuclear technology, internet, cell phones, social media, the microwave. But we haven’t killed our self off yet. Maybe it is just slowly killing us or driving us crazy. But for better or for worse it is part of our life’s and their is no removing it now. AI is here to stay.

          • Storksforlegs@beehaw.orgEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I think you’re right about photographers, but not when it comes to digital versus traditional art.

            I know there are instances where AI can be used to clean things up, re-colour things, put filters on, yeah okay. But that is not the problem - generative AI is the problem.

            Digitally created animation and artwork requires the same kind of knowledge, ability (and time to learn) as traditional artwork. Computers can take away some of the more laborious aspects, but it’s still a time consuming, difficult thing to create artwork and animation, whether digital or traditional. I think a lot of people defending AI art don’t understand how time consuming and involved producing art actually is.

            The fact that you can type “draw a cat in the style of this artist” - and get a damned good, perfect result? How is that artist named in the prompt supposed to feel?

            The growth of AI has come on the backs of artists, having been trained using people’s art (without their permission.) Now instead of hiring an artist, customers can just type in a prompt. Artists who were once able to support themself are now screwed.

            I don’t mean to be negative here, (apologies, this just fires me up) but generative AI is a catastrophy for artists.

  • Aaron@beehaw.orgEnglish
    26·
    1 year ago

    I wonder if these battles will shake loose the circuit split on de minimis exceptions to music samples (see https://lawreview.richmond.edu/2022/06/10/a-music-industry-circuit-split-the-de-minimis-exception-in-digital-sampling/).

    Currently, it is absolutely not “cut and dried” whether the use of any given sample should be permitted. Most musicians are erring on the side of “clear everything,” but does an AI-generated “simulacrum” qualify as “sampling”?

    What’s on trial here is basically “what characteristic(s) of an artist’s work do they own?” If you write a song, you can “own” whatever is written down (melody, lyrics, etc.) If you perform a song, you can own the performance (recordings thereof, etc.) Things start to get pretty vague when we start talking about “I own the sound of my voice.”

    I think it’s accepted that it’s legal for an impersonator to make a living doing TikToks pretending to be Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise can’t really sue them saying “he sounds like me.” But is it different if a computer does it? It may very well be.

    It’s going to be a pretty rough few years in copyright litigation. Buckle up.

    • TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      What more, if they over-litigate, then the economy of the country that over-litigate will fall behind compared to the rest of the world as other country would overtake USA. There is no if or but in this scenario. For instance, poor people in third world country would absolutely leverage this technologies to boost their ability to make an income.

  • HexDecimal@programming.devEnglish
    20·
    1 year ago

    Corporate middlemen on AI model generated content: “When we do it, it’s okay! But when you do it, it’s stealing!”

    This genie can’t be put back in the bottle and what they wished for has became a monkeys paw for the media monopolies who thought they could replace all their artists with an unpaid robot. They’ll try to update the laws to stop this but it’s already too late.

    • fuser@quex.ccEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Music is an imitative communication medium in all human cultures throughout history. The commodification, copyright and control of its distribution was eventually doomed to fail.

      “Hello EMI! Good bye A & M (fart)” - the Sex Pistols, Never Mind The Bollocks

  • Fubarberry@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    A lot of the AI stuff is a Pandora’s box situation. The box is already open, there’s no closing it back. AI art, AI music, and AI movies will become increasingly high quality and widespread.

    The biggest thing we still have a chance to influence with it is whether it’s something that individuals have access to or if it becomes another field dominated by the same tech giants that already own everything. An example is people being against stable diffusion because it’s trained by individuals on internet images, but then being ok with a company like Adobe doing it because they snuck a line into their ToS that they can train AI off of anything uploaded to their creative cloud.

    • RandoCalrandian@kbin.social
      11·
      1 year ago

      whether it’s something that individuals have access to

      No we don’t. That’s the box being opened.

      Here’s a leaked google internal memo telling them as such: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

      tl;dr: The open source community has accomplished more in a month of Meta’s AI weights being released than everything we have, and shows no signs of slowing down. We have no secret sauce, no way to prevent anyone from setting up their own, and the opensource community already has almost-GPT equivalents running on old laptops and they’re targeting the model running directly on the phone, making our expensive single ai solutions entirely obsolete.

      Edit:

      In addition, these corporations only have AI in the first place by stealing/scraping data from regular people and the open source community. Individuals should not feel obligated to honor any rule or directive that these technologies be owned and operated by only big players.

      • greenskye@beehaw.org
        3·
        1 year ago

        The only advantage corporations could have had came from having the money to throw at extremely high quality training data. The fact that they cheaped out and just used whatever they could find on the internet (or paid a vendor, who just used AI to generate AI training data) has definitely contributed to the lack of any differentiating advantage.

    • etrotta@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Saying that Stable Diffusion was trained by “individuals” is a bit of a stretch, it cost over half a million dollars worth of compute to train it, and Stability AI is still a company in the end of the day. If that still counts as trained by individuals, then so does Midjourney and Dalle

      • Fubarberry@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Original stable diffusion wasn’t trained by individuals, but clearly the current progression of the software is largely community driven. All sorts of new tech and add-ons for it, huge volumes of community trained checkpoints and Lora’s, and of course the interfaces themselves like automatic1111 and vladmatic.

        And it’s something you can run yourself offline with a halfway decent graphics card.

  • ryan@the.coolest.zone
    9·
    1 year ago

    I mean, the issue the RIAA is raising does not seem to be on AI training, but piracy:

    The RIAA has asked Discord to shut down a server called “AI Hub,” alleging that its 145,000 or so members share and distribute copyrighted music: Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever,” for instance, or Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby.” These songs, and several others by the likes of Ludacris, Stevie Wonder, and Ariana Grande, were named in the RIAA’s June 14 subpoena to Discord (pdf).

    The music files were being used as datasets to train AI voice generators, which could then churn out deepfake tracks in the styles of these singers.

    Later in the article:

    It wasn’t clear, from the RIAA’s letters, whether the body was complaining about the databases of original music or about the AI tracks being generated out of them.

    Like, I’m sure they’re spooked by AI generated tracks and losing control of the industry… but this seems like a pretty clear cut case of shutting down a Discord server engaged in music piracy.

  • Janis@feddit.deEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    There once upon a time was a band called moroon5 or sth that had no success with their mediocre band music. out of thin air and by accident one of their songs became a hit. and they felt they were artists. the wrote new songs that failed until it dawned the label: repeat. because people do not want art but emotions. like the olden tribal times. a feeling of group.

    yet everyone thinks they have a good taste in music and Oasis is art.you dont. and it is not.

    ban AI in medicine, because the work of a doctor is art compared to a moron5 song. make it copyright infringement if your AI solves excel shit as good as this one excel artist.

    there is no intellectual property on anything.

      • Janis@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        well so is cooking. knitting. telling a bed time story. if you want to call everything art.

        yet the definition of art includes the dire need of the artist to express sth that the artist feels is not or underrepresented. i read a philosopher says we should stop thinking of ourselves being so special. animals have feelings too, can do planning and even reasoning. is the birds song art. nope. it is not. so to me 100% of popular music is no art but an enjoyment for people. just like birds might enjoy some chirping.

        • luckystarr@feddit.deEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          First I thought you were writing incoherently, but now I understand your point.

          I agree with what you said, that our “art” is most likely just something akin to bird song. Maybe even less or something else entirely.

          My point of view: Birds also have a “rebellious phase” where their songs differ from the songs of the general population. They are experimenting with new and unorthodox songs. These go away after they come of age and have to find a mate. My hypothesis (well, I’m no bird) is that there is a lot of emotional impact in these bird songs, whereas in some songs humans produce, much which previously required emotional awareness or emotional connection is now being replaced by templates, methods and formulas to make music. It’s some sort of depersonalization or objectification of the process of making music. This is probably what you meant by “it isn’t art anymore”.

          Did I get right, what you were trying to convey?

          • Janis@feddit.deEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            yeah my english is not good enough to explain things like that any better. sorry.

            i read deezer said customers 30 and older do not listen to new genres.(unless forced to find a mating partner) there is no interest in the usual music consumption toexperience art or even just change. it is the rhythm of your tribe. to feel comfy. to not feel alone. thats not art. why would anyone have the rights to the rhythm of anyones tribe. absurd. art is sth. else. and popular music is just the peak of what you described.

  • Dandroid@dandroid.appEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Oh my wife tried this. She had it generate a song where it was Taylor Swift’s voice singing a song that wasn’t hers. I didn’t listen too closely, but it sounded decent.

    This is really terrifying technology, though. Scammers are probably already working on using it to generate calls to call people’s elderly parents and claim that they are in trouble and need money.