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AI music is a problem

Right now, any intellectual property created by AI is not protected by copyright, at least not in the USA.

This is a double-edged sword because it means there's virtually nothing to stop "creators" from knocking out an endless stream of tracks and distributing them however they want.

Earning money from such creations however, becomes a little more problematic.

According to some of the largest music streaming sites on the internet, around half of all tracks uploaded these days are AI-generated and they're paying money to people who've likely done little more than type a few words into an AI system such as those offered by Suno or Udio.

Is this really fair?

And what about the intellectual property rights of "real" musicians whose work has been used, often without permission, to train those AI music generation agents?

Right now, music publishers are setting out to strike deals with the likes of Suno in an effort to "protect the rights of artists", or so they say.

The goal seems to be to ensure that the recording labels get a clip on the ticket of any AI tracks that have been trained on artists published by those labels. This is their way of ensuring that intellectual property rights of real people are protected in the era of unlimited AI music generation.

However, there is a problem, a huge problem.

Nobody can actually provide a mechanism that clearly reports which actual artists' work has been used by AI to create any given track. This makes it impossible to give fair and equitable compensation to artists whose work has become training material for an AI system.

Of course the recording companies don't care. They're not so much concerned with compensating artists as extracting as much money as they can for themselves.

AI music generation services may end up paying the studios a tiny amount for every track their systems create but chances are that those studios will just pocket the money by claiming they can't pass it on to artists because they can't identify the entitled party.

Yeah, that's the state of the music industry, it's little more than a racket that sees highly paid studio execs doing whatever it takes to boost the bottom line while paying as little as possible to those whose work they sell.

I guess they could simply pool all the licensing revenues paid by these AI companies and then distribute it evenly amongst their contracted artists but that wouldn't be fair either.

Then there's the issue that some AI-generated tracks may be have been created using data that was mainly from one studio yet all studios would get a percentage of that licensing fee because nobody can identify the artist or the studio whose work was most influential in creating the end result.

Another thing that concerns me a little is that if I was an independent musician and started creating my own original works, you can bet your bottom dollar that the melodies and lyrics I wrote would have been at least in some way influenced by music I'd heard previously. In effect, every musician has been "trained" by listening to the works of others. So why should an AI have to pay a license for that training data while a human artist does not?

There is also the issue of hybrid works. What happens when an AI creates something that is then altered or augmented by human creativity? Should the same licensing costs apply or should they be scaled pro-rata to the percentage of AI involvement and if so, how can you prove or calculate that rate?

What a dog's breakfast!

The sobering thing is that just a decade ago, nobody could have predicted that computers would be challenging humans in such a creative and artistic field as music. We all felt that the creative arts would be one area where computers could never compete.

Boy, were we wrong!

Carpe Diem folks!

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