[eezurr]

Music will continue to be made by humans because of strong copyright law. Its illegal to sample (and distribute) > 0 seconds of recorded music. If that makes it into any ai generated music, its game over if you distribute it.

Source on sampling: the head audio engineer at Juilliard School of Music.

[dinobones]

Why would being a "head audio engineer" at Julliard give you any credibility on AI generated music and sampling/copyright law? Lol.

[eezurr]

Because they work with/teach electronic music/sampling in addition to recording classical acoustic music.

[Geee]

It's not sampling. Sampling is copying & pasting, but that doesn't happen, technically. Just like stable diffusion doesn't copy any artworks. AI learns from previous works, but doesn't copy them. It's quite similar to how humans learn and make adaptations based on other work.

[eezurr]

While technically true, the unspoken premise of my argument is that it can and will output distinctive samples derived from the source. E.g. you cant change the pitch, tempo, and add other effects and call the output your own, legally.

Its a landmine

[Baloo]

Do you mean it's a minefield* :P

Not sure it's as much of a problem as you're making it seem though.. likely there can be enough iteration that it would not be distinguishable.

Also lots of mainstream artists ignore copyright anyway (Kanye West etc). Plus you could just use training data that is from public domain stuff if it was really such an issue, there is decades worth of music that are outside of copyright law.

[skybrian]

That seems like good advice for professionals, but I'm wondering if it's going to hold up with new ways of distribution.

Would distributing a generative model that can sometimes generate such music would also be considered illegal? Will it actually stop people from doing it in practice?

Would it be illegal to share seeds and prompts?

Though these alternative methods, you could have a lot of people listening to music that's never distributed as audio or video files. And if there's an API for it, games could use such generated music via a plugin.

And then I suppose people start sharing on YouTube, and we see how good their copyright violation detection actually is.

[Quikinterp]

People sample music all the time. Sometimes credit and royalties are given, but there are lots of popular music being made that samples without credit.

Against the law? Maybe, probably. I don't think the laws are as strong as they appear though.