Musical artists sound AI infringement warning

By Dr. Tim Sandle
October 28, 2024
DIGITAL JOURNAL

Singer-songwriter Billy Bragg performing in Vancouver, Canada at the Body of War Concert. Image by Kris Krug (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Many companies using artificial intelligence technologies are seeking to improve the performance of their platforms. This involves training AI through a variety of media. Many artists are protesting over their works being used as training data for large language models (LLMs).

The companies involved include OpenAI, Anthropic, and now Perplexity. In the U.S. this has led to several lawsuits being filed. The defence from Anthropic argues that this form of training constitutes a ‘fair use’ under current U.S. copyright law.

In move set to aggravate creatives even more, the UK government is considering changing copyright law to allow AI companies to train on copyrighted works without a licence in place.

In response, the Human Artistry Campaign has organized a petition, signed by more than 11,500 actors, artists, authors, musicians, and organisations against this move. Thise involved in the campaign include Thom Yorke, Björn Ulvaeus, Max Richter, and Billy Bragg.

The petition reads: “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works and must not be permitted.”

Earlier in 2024, Billie Eilish, R.E.M., and Nicki Minaj signed a separate open letter protesting “the predatory use of AI” in the music industry.

The organiser of the new letter, the British composer and former AI executive Ed Newton-Rex, has told The Guardian that people who make a living from creative work are “very worried” about the situation.

“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free,” Newton-Rex states.

Another controversy is with the AI music generator Suno. The $500 million company was sued by the major record companies, along with fellow AI firm Udio, for allegedly training their systems using the majors’ recordings without permission.

Since then, the artist Timbaland has joined the company in a strategic advisory role. In addition, he is also previewing his latest single, Love Again, exclusively on the platform, according to Music Business Worldwide.

Other musical artists and composers who have signed the letter include the Cure’s Robert Smith, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, Jamiroquai’s Jason Kay, AURORA, Nitin Sawhney, and Sir John Rutter.