‘This assault on human creativity must be stopped’
It’s no secret that music is on the verge of an AI revolution, with artists like Holly Herndon, Grimes, and Sevdaliza using the technology as a tool to enhance their practice. On the flipside, streaming services are being flooded with generative music fed to us in the form of algorithm-friendly playlists and AI deepfakes stealing the likeness of artists – think last year’s Drake deepfake that nearly got nominated for a Grammy.
Now, a group of celebs have decided to take a stand against the “predatory” use of AI in an open letter calling for protection against technology that mimics human artists’ likenesses, voices and sound, with signees including Billie Eilish, J Balvin and Nicki Minaj. The estates of Frank Sinatra and Bob Marley are also signatories.
Issued by the Artist Rights Alliance, the letter urges tech companies to stop developing AI tools that undermine or replace human songwriters and artists. “This assault on human creativity must be stopped. We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem,” it reads.
The letter doesn’t exactly go in-depth about the sort of regulations they have in mind, neither does it call for a complete ban on the use of AI music, and points out that responsible use of the technology could have benefits for the industry. It’s true, there've been plenty of AI breakthroughs the past few years, with experimental artists such as Debit, Lee Gamble and Oneohtrix Point Never all playing with the limits of human-machine creativity in recent releases.
On the other hand, there’s understandably been a pushback from artists demanding ethical and legal protection surrounding copyright, with calls to regulate uses of AI tech amidst fast-growing tools built on training data pulled from actual artists – TikTok is currently trialling a new music-making AI based on text prompts, while Suno, a tool that’s been dubbed the ‘ChatGPT for music’, allows free users to generate up to 10 songs a day.
Last month, Tennessee became the first US state to make it illegal to replicate an artist’s voice without consent. The ELVIS act is meant to protect artists from having their likeness replicated for commercial reasons, but it doesn’t address artists’ work being used as data to train AI models.
“Some of the biggest and most powerful companies are, without permission, using our work to train AI models,” the ARA letter states. “These efforts are directly aimed at replacing the work of human artists with massive quantities of AI-created ‘sounds’ and ‘images’ that substantially dilute the royalty pools that are paid out to artists.”