The music industry is waging war upon an AI server on Discord

the w@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 89 points – The music industry is waging war upon an AI server on Discord
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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?

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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

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I struggle to see how any music made by people for the enjoyment of people isn't art

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.

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?

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.