On Tuesday, the Artists Rights Alliance (ARA) released an open letter criticizing AI technology, signed by over 200 artists, including Pearl Jam, Nicki Minaj, Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello and others.
In the letter, the artists call on AI developers, tech companies, platforms and digital music services to stop using AI to “violate and degrade the rights of human artists.” A tweet from ARA added that AI poses an “existential threat” to their art.
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Visual artists began protesting the emergence of genetic AI, following the rise of the first major AI image creators in 2022, and considering that genetic AI research has since been taken up for other forms of creative media, we have seen this protest extend to professionals in other creative fields as well, such as writers, actors, directors – and now musicians.
“ When used irresponsibly, artificial intelligence poses enormous threats to our ability to protect our privacy, our identities, our music, and our survival, ” the open letter states. It alleges that some of the “ largest and most powerful ” companies (not named in the letter) are using artists’ work without permission to train artificial intelligence models, with the goal of replacing human artists with AI-generated content
In January, Billboard reported that artificial intelligence research at Google DeepMind had trained an anonymous AI to create music using a large set of copyrighted data without asking the artist for permission. This could be Google’s Lyria, an AI creation model announced in November that the company touts as a tool to enhance human creativity. The technology has since powered music experiments on YouTube.
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Although we have yet to see an AI model that can create perfect, high-quality music on demand, the quality of results from music composition models is gradually improving over time.
Let’s recall historical examples where innovations in technology caused concern among artists to understand the potential impact of AI on music. For example, the introduction of synthesizers in the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence of digital sampling in the 1980s were initially met with reservations and fear by parts of the music community, but the music industry eventually adapted.
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Even though fear of the unknown regarding artificial intelligence was observed over the past year, it is likely that artificial intelligence tools will be integrated into the music production process just like any other tool or music production technique that preceded it. It is also likely that even if this integration takes place, some artists may be negatively affected along the way—and ARA wants to point this out before the technology progresses further.
Source: arstechnica
