Success Beyond The Score

Large Language Models (LLMs) have experienced a massive boom in the last couple of years. Their use has spread across all industries, creating a surge of multimedia content generated through Artificial Intelligence (genAI). After the initial wave of excitement, more and more institutions and organisations have come forward to denounce the negative impact of this technology in multiple aspects.

One of them has to do with creative ownership. In order to function, LLMs must be fed gigantic amounts of data. So far, there has not been adequate regulation about the origin of said data, nor how the human creators of it should be recognised and compensated. In the case of music, this has resulted in the work of hundreds of thousands of composers and recording artists being fed to LLMs without consent. To aggravate things, the musical output generated by LLMs is fast to produce and cheap to sell, which has degraded or outright eliminated jobs for musicians.

Updating the existing legislation o...

The Musicians' Union is cautious about the government consultation currently going on in regard to copyrighted material being used to train generative artificial intelligence (genAI). The consultation is a direct successor of a government-proposed exception that saw the light in 2023, and didn't go through due to strong opposition from the creative industry. The difference this time is that the government has outlined a way for right holders to prevent their works from being used to train AI systems. Alternatively, they could opt to negotiate a presumably paid licence for their use.

In the realm of music, the right holders are mainly record labels and publishers. However, musicians who signed their contracts and transferred their rights before the boom of genAI had no way to foresee the weight this technology would have in the cultural landscape and industry, or the impact its use would have in their revenue. For this reason, the Musicians' Union advocates for each creator having the...