The Impact of "AI" on the Music Industry

The boom of generative AI brings difficult challenges to the music industry. In an effort to keep regulations on par with the development of this technology, the Musicians' Union is pushing for copyright law to be upheld in relation to it, and for new rights to be introduced that will protect musicians and music creators from any unauthorised use of their works and performances.

Generative AI needs massive amounts of data —in the case of music, the input is millions of songs and sound samples— to train with, before it can generate pieces from given prompts. This data so far has been collected without explicit consent by its original, human creators. Developers argue that their LLMs (large language models, generally referred to as "AI") learn from the source data in a way similar to humans, therefore they can't incur in copyright infringement. However, these systems are unable to create their own ideas. Instead, they search for patterns in pre-existing music so, when they get a prompt, they can build a song by sequencing multiple likely patterns. While they don't copy music pieces in a "traditional" way, they are unable to think about music, and they'd be completely unable to generate anything without "leeching" from the human thought process that created the data used for training it.

To face this challenge, the Musicians' Union is pushing for copyright regulations being applied to generative AI, so each musician has to give their explicit and individual consent before their music can be used for training LLMs. They are also calling attention to the issue of deepfakes, which are videos in which both the appearance and voice of subjects are altered to create false evidence of situations that never actually happened. Generative AI is one of the technologies used to make deepfakes, and there's general concern about how this usually ill-intended practise can hurt people of all spheres of life, including musicians.

 What you can do? Write to your label, publisher or both, stating that your music and your likeness cannot be fed into any LLM without your explicit consent. If you need help, or you want to learn more about this, check the MU's article on what they're doing here.