[gazebo64]

The difference being that a musician being influenced by other musicians still has to work to develop the skills necessary to distill those influences into a final product, and colors that output with their own subjective experiences and taste. This feels like a conveniently naive interpretation to justify stealing artists' work and using it to create derivative generative slop. The final line in your comment is pretty telling of how seriously you take this issue (which is near-universally decried by artists) -- some other massive company is doing a bad thing, so why shouldn't I?

edit: I have to add how disingenuous I find calling out corporations owning "all of humanity's musical knowledge and history" as if generative AI music trained on unlicensed work from artists is somehow a moral good. At least the contracts artists make with these corporations are consensual and have the potential to yield the artist some benefit which is more than you can say for these gen-AI music apps.

[zaptrem]

I don't see how the amount of work that went into it changes the core fact that all art is influenced by that which came before, and we don't call that stealing (unless you truly believe that "all art is theft").

My point re: LLMs wasn't meant to exclusively be a "they're doing it" one, the hope was to give an example of something many people would agree is super useful and valuable (I work much faster and learned so much more in college thanks to LLMs) that would be impossible in the proposed strict interpretation of copyright.

edit responding to your edit:

Re: moral good: I think that bringing the sum of human musical knowledge to anybody who cares to try for free is a moral good. Music production software costs >$200 and studios cost thousands and majoring in music costs hundreds of thousands, but we can make getting started so much easier.

Is it really consent for those artists signing to labels when only three companies have total control of all music consumption and production for the mass market? To be clear, artists absolutely have a right to benefit from reproduction of their recordings. I just don't think anyone should have rights to the knowledge built into those creations since in most cases it wasn't theirs to begin with (if their right to this knowledge were affirmed, every new song someone creates could hypothetically have a konga line of lawyer teams clamoring for "their cut" of that chord progression/instrument sample/effect/lyrical theme/style).

[gazebo64]

I think we intuitively allow for artists to derive and interpolate from their influences because of a baseline understanding that A) it is impossible to create art without influence and B) that there is an inherent value in a human creating art and expressing themselves. How that relates to someone using unlicensed music from actual humans to train an AI model in order to profit off of the collective work of thousands of actual human artists, I have no idea.

edit:

> I think that bringing the sum of human musical knowledge to anybody who cares to try for free is a moral good

Generative AI music isn't in any way accomplishing this goal. A free Spotify account with ads accomplishes this goal -- being able to generate a passable tune using a mish-mash of existing human works isn't bringing musical knowledge to the masses, it's just enabling end users to entertain themselves and you to profit from that.

> Is it really consent for those artists signing to labels

Yes? Ignoring the fact that there are independent labels outside the ownership of the Big Three you mention, artists enter into contracts with labels consensually because of the benefits the label can offer them. You train your model on these artists' output without their consent, credit or notification, profit off of it and offer nothing in return to the artists.

[zaptrem]

A) Agreed! B) So I guess the argument here is that this doesn't apply to AI music. I think that if someone really pours their soul into the lyrics of a song and regenerates/experiments with prompts until it's just right, and maybe even contributes a melody or starting point that's still a human creating art and expressing themselves. It's definitely not as difficult as creating a song from scratch, but I've been told similar arguments were made regarding whether photography was art when that became a thing.

btw, if the user of the AI doesn't do any of the above then I think the US copyright office says it can't be copyrighted in the first place (so no profiting for them anyway).

[gazebo64]

> if the user of the AI doesn't do any of the above then I think the US copyright office says it can't be copyrighted in the first place (so no profiting for them anyway).

Am I understanding right that the point here is that while you are able to get away with using copyrighted material to turn a profit, your end users cannot, so no worries?

[haswell]

I think there are a few fallacies at play here:

1. Anthropomorphizing the kind of “influence” and “learning” these tools are doing, which is quite unrelated to the human process

2. Underrepresenting the massive differences in scale when comparing the human process of learning vs. the massive data centers training the AI models

3. Ignoring that this isn’t just about influence, it’s about the fact that the models would not exist at all, if not for the work of the artists it was trained on

[naltroc]

> Is it really consent for those artists signing to labels when only three companies have total control of all music consumption and production for the mass market?

This premise is false. I have made plenty of money busking on the street, for example. Or selling audio recordings at shows.

> {o be clear, artists absolutely have a right to benefit from reproduction of their recordings.

This is correct. Artists benefit when you pay them for the right to reproduce. When you don't (like what you are doing), you get sued. Here's a YouTube video covering 9 examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIVSt8Y1zeQ

> I just don't think anyone should have rights to the knowledge built into those creations since in most cases it wasn't theirs to begin with

What?

[zaptrem]

> I have made plenty of money busking on the street

That's why I specified mass market. However, given a choice between literally being on the street and working with a record label I'd probably choose the label, though I don't know about others.

> pay them for the right to reproduce

My point is learning patterns/styles does not equate to reproducing their recordings. If someone wants to listen to "Hey Jude" they cannot do so with our model, they must go to Spotify. There are cases where models from our competitors were trained for too long on too small a dataset and were able to recite songs, but that's a bug they admit is wrong and are fighting against, not a feature.

> in most cases it wasn't theirs to begin with

In most cases they did not invent the chord progression they're using or instruments they're playing or style they're using or even the lyrical themes they're singing. All are based on what came before and the musicians that come after them are able to use any new knowledge they contribute freely. It's all a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork, and if everyone along the line decided they were entitled to a cut we'd have disaster.

[quantumspandex]

Law should be considered to be artificial rules optimized for the collective good of society.

What's the worst that can happen if we allow unregulated AI training on existing music? Musician as a job won't exist anymore lest for the greatest artists. But it makes creating music much more accessible to billions of people. Are they good music? Let the market decide. And people still make music because the creative process is enjoyable.

The animus towards AI generated music deeply stems from job security. I work in software and I see it is more likely that AI can be eventually able to replace software devs. I may lose my job if that happens. But I don't care. Find another career. Humanity needs to progress instead of stagnating for the sake of a few interest groups.

[gazebo64]

I don't work as a musician so it's nothing to do with job security -- I think that using artists' output without their consent in order to train a soulless AI model for some tech middleman to profit from is repugnant, and the cheap rhetoric about democratizing music and "bringing music to the masses!" adds insult to injury. I can guarantee if OP's intellectual property was violated in this project, like somebody ripping off their model or trademark, they'd be suing, but they conveniently handwave away mass scale IP theft when it comes to musicians.