Universal Music Asks Streaming Services to Block AI Access to Its Songs

https://variety.com/2023/music/news/universal-music-streaming-services-block-ai-1235582612/

by signa11 • 3 years ago

105 257 3 years ago

variety.com

_spduchamp• 3 years ago

At least until they setup their own AI music division, which they will totally do.

lukeh3• 3 years ago

I’ll trust the majors to compensate rightsholders more than I’d trust tech bros.

jacknews3• 3 years ago

define 'rightsholders'

Oh right, in most cases, it's actually the majors themselves.

lol

InCityDreams2• 3 years ago

the majors to compensate rightsholders

Ie themselves.

mtillman2• 3 years ago

Reminds me of Jamie Dimon telling congress that BTC was a scam and should be banned while paying an entire team of people to work on a BTC play for customers.

garyfirestorm• 3 years ago

fiduciary duty /s

soylentcola• 3 years ago

Right? How much of these labels' music is focus grouped? Or from performers signed by scouts looking for stuff that sounds like what's already selling? Or tweaked and sweetened with software to optimize based on play statistics?

It's not that they have a problem with derivative work. It's a huge part of their catalog. They'd just rather train software on their digital assets and use it to further optimize their own product. Why would they want to help others do the same?

I doubt popular music fans are going to consciously prefer "JamBot69" over "Band of Hot and Interesting People", but will they know if the latter had their songs penned or "improved" by the former?

adamwong246• 3 years ago

We are waking up to the fact that these AIs are really more like juicers- they extract the "good stuff" ie replicable patterns, after which the original data is no longer needed. All the free stuff we put onto the web is what make GPTs so smart. So of course the media titans will move to block the juicing of their sweet sweet IPs.

frumper• 3 years ago

Sounds similar to how google squeezes certain information out of a website to display so you don't need to bother visiting the actual website.

anoncow2• 3 years ago

New legal lessons from the age of AI. I wonder if we will start with the judges ruling that AI originated music can be copyrighted or not and whether AI trained on copyrighted music has to attribute its creations (to what?).

bushbaba• 3 years ago

if generative ai needs to attribute its music, so will musicians need to attribute their creations to past artists they studied and listened to.

EamonnMR4• 3 years ago

You need to obtain the rights to samples you use, why should this be any different?

hospitalJail4• 3 years ago

Stuff like this is why I'm so allergic to law.

Imagine how much human resource is spent trying to preserve profits. Imagine your job is to be a lawyer that slows human progress for short term corporate profits. Imagine you are a judge who has to waste time on this case. Imagine you are a lawmaker and instead of fixing US medical, you are getting lunch with a lobbyist trying to make some variant of AI illegal.

All of those people have an existence that is bad for society. I imagine if you prioritize personal profits, its easy to do the job. Its much harder if your world view involves doing good things for society.

EamonnMR4• 3 years ago

Is this really progress, or mere expropriation?

shadowgovt6• 3 years ago

Law is pretty vital to being able to have a planet with billions of people on it.

If for no other reason than people are really crafty and nearly optimal for wrecking up each other's business if they put their minds to it. Imagine how much human resource is spent trying to preserve profits... Now imagine how much would be spent on preserving anything without a legal system in place. "Nice house you have, hate to see anything happen to it" etc.

hospitalJail4• 3 years ago

I know this is all about self preservation, but gosh I hate hindering progress.

Its going to happen and AI is going to learn lyrics and how to create music, its inevitable. These are just roadblocks that are bad for everyone but the extreme minority.

Even if one company/country bans it, in 10 years, it won't matter.

asjdflakjsdf• 3 years ago

I am seeing this sentiment so often online at the minute that it seems as though nobody has learned anything about DRM over the past 20 years. So many threads on reddit calling Italy "backwards" for protecting citizens data, and now people on HN expecting companies to give everything away for free because of the outcome is "inevitable"!

There are a bunch of for-profit American AI companies. Why on Earth would another for-profit company, especially one based in another country, be ok with other people making money from their content. They can either look at developing their own AI platform, or build deals with the existing AI companies. It would be just plain stupid to give it all away for free, or any price that isn't determined by themselves.

Analemma_• 3 years ago

Because (at least in America) generative AI is an obvious transformative case allowable under Fair Use, and even if courts rule otherwise, like Sci-Hub it's such an obvious net positive for humanity that it's ethical to use even in the face of IP cops demanding you stop.

matheusmoreira15• 3 years ago

Companies don't have to give away everything for free. It's already free. Public domain is the natural state of information. They're the ones who insist on copyright so they can maintain the artificial scarcity delusion well into 2023 where AI is literally on its way to automating intellectual work. These irrelevant industries need to stop holding us all back and just disappear already.

Jevon23• 3 years ago

Making a large profit off of other people’s work, without their permission and without compensating them, is not progress.

If someone said “for the sake of progress we just REALLY need to use this GPL’d code in our proprietary closed source app”, I don’t think that would fly around here.

shadowgovt6• 3 years ago

Making a large profit off of other people’s work, without their permission and without compensating them, is not progress.

Best dynamite all the bridges because I sure haven't paid any of the (now quite-long-dead) people who put them up.

ronsor• 3 years ago

If someone said “for the sake of progress we just REALLY need to use this GPL’d code in our proprietary closed source app”, I don’t think that would fly around here.

Arguably that's because putting GPL code in a proprietary app is making a free thing closed. FWIW, I don't like proprietary AI models either, but I think open-source ones shouldn't be hampered by the copyright mafia.

FrenchDevRemote3• 3 years ago

Using content as training data is not making profit off other people work.

Musicians don't pay royalties to every other musician they've ever listened to, but that's literally their training data, the brain is just a large neural network.

gumballindie9• 3 years ago

Its going to happen and AI is going to learn lyrics and how to create music, its inevitable.

Why is everyone in AI so open to stealing people's work and why do y'all think "ai" is something with a mind of its own that just runs about and does things? It's a software product and the companies owning it must play by the rules. Period.

selfhoster11• 3 years ago

“Companies owning it” is presumably not what the parent had in mind (or at least, not mainly). People should have access to locally-running AI just as megacorps do. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to require licensing for every little thing used to train those, much like we (hopefully) wouldn’t require people leaving the cinema to be memory-wiped to prevent them from stealing creative cues from the film they just watched, if memory wiping was a thing.

why do y'all think "ai" is something with a mind of its own that just runs about and does things?

Because GPT-4 is already capable of doing this (very poorly) if incorporated into a larger system that provides it with REPLs, internet access, an initial goal, and some form of memory. GPT-5 will be more capable, and AI will only get better at this.

hammyhavoc7• 3 years ago

Remember NFTs ripping off the work of others? Same crowd.

stale20026• 3 years ago

Why is everyone in AI so open to stealing people's work

Because it is no more "stealing" than when a human learns from other people's work, and then makes a profit off of it.

the companies owning it must play by the rules

Nobody has proven that they are breaking any rules.

mattmcknight• 3 years ago

Is listening to a bunch of music and being inspired by it to create new music stealing?

eastbound• 3 years ago

We can go the other way:

- Entirely remove intellectual property protection granted by copyright,

- Music is freely copiable. Not like we’re making much money with it anymore.

- Software is free by default. Use SAAS if you don’t want to give away your IP. Did you disclose your code? Too bad, ideas can’t be prevented from being copied.

- No more patent trolls. Find another way to fund drug research.

- AI can train on anything. We make a big leap forward.

hammyhavoc7• 3 years ago

A big leap forward to what? A big regression in the joy of creativity?

What a lot of AI folks don't understand is that the joy is frequently in the process itself, very seldom in the outcome/result of a process.

YurgenJurgensen3• 3 years ago

How naïve of you to think that AI won't be coming for SAAS next. With all the API externals, the social media activity of all your employees and a video feed through the window of one of your home-working coders, a next-gen coding AI just reverse-engineered your entire software stack. With how porous modern systems are, no back-end code worth stealing hasn't been stolen.

hospitalJail4• 3 years ago

I unironically endorse this.

52-6F-62• 3 years ago

So much for “automate the boring things”. The mask has really come off this past year.

butterfi• 3 years ago

I stopped reading at "“We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists..." It's true, but they big music companies are well known for their business practices.

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

It's illustrative that, even with its history of lopsided deals with creators, Universal Music has the ethical high ground in this case because at least they have legally-binding business arrangements with their artists.

shadowgovt6• 3 years ago

There is no ethical high ground here.

There is only creative output bent towards the artificial framework of capitalism.

One could argue there is some weak ethical underpinning in "In the absence of higher moral values, one should simply adhere to previous agreements and laws..." Except previous agreements and laws give basically no guidance on the topic of "Can I use this data to train a machine to make more data?" Especially if the thusly-created data can't even, itself, be copyrighted. It's a novel use-case unpredicted by the existing copyright framework.

kneebonian2• 3 years ago

"It's better than legal we are using the law to keep justice away" - PHB, Dilbert

omginternets• 3 years ago

It would at least be entertaining to see the RIAA sue companies rather than individuals for a change.

KMnO4• 3 years ago

“Hey independent artist, let’s make a deal. You spend hundreds or thousands of hours creating music and we’ll help you sell it”

“Sure, and I assume you’ll want a 10% cut?”

“Nope, give me 80% if someone buys it”

“But people don’t buy music anymore. How much money will you give me if a thousand people stream my music?”

“We can do $2. Take it or leave it.”

Mountain_Skies• 3 years ago

Reminds me of when Garth Brooks went on a crusade against used CD stores selling his albums without him getting a cut. After the predictable blowback, he claimed it wasn't his income he was fighting for, it was all the small indy artists he was protecting even though the bulk of used CD sales were of mainstream artists like Brooks. Eventually he realized no one was buying that excuse and he dropped his opposition (or maybe one of his legal staff explained first sale doctrine to him).

kenjackson3• 3 years ago

Can you block the training? It would seem you could block the generation of copyright violations. But training an AI is really the same as me listening to the music. The problem occurs if I copy the music.

EamonnMR4• 3 years ago

But training an AI is really the same as me listening to the music.

That remains to be seen, legally. I think that if copyright law wants to keep existing it's going to have to treat training as a form of copying.

nradov2• 3 years ago

bheadmaster2• 3 years ago

The difference between "recording" and "training" is really fuzzy. Not even the "exact reproduction" provides a well-defined line, as re-mixing and modifying a song is still considered a copyright violation.

People love to draw the analogy to human listening, and while in principle I agree, the AI is still not human and the argument isn't necessarily valid - it needs arguments to why it's valid, too.

tjr8• 3 years ago

People love to draw the analogy to human listening, and while in principle I agree, the AI is still not human and the argument isn't necessarily valid

It could be worth considering: humans are [ostensibly, I claim] intelligent by default. There are obviously different details of scenarios, but humans can learn to speak by just being around their immediate family; they may only read a few dozen books in their lifetime; they can appreciate music listening to their very first album.

AI (at least the current rendition of it) is trained on a massive collection of data before we could even start to claim they are intelligent. You can't take an empty neural network and have it listen to a single album and it gets anything worthwhile out of that. It can't read a few dozen books and be able to do much of anything. It needs a much, much larger data set before we would even think of saying it was intelligent.

So I think, to compare a human listening to an album, and a trained AI system listening to an album, yes, those two things might be reasonably analogous. But to even get the AI system to that point, it needed to be built up using a huge quantity of data. Do the copyright holders on that data concur with that training usage? I think, in that respect, there is a difference compared to a human listening to a recording.

Randomly pontificating in a discussion forum here; not offering a well-thought-out plan for everyone to live by!

triceratops• 3 years ago

But training an AI is really the same as me listening to the music

That's what we think right now. But copyright never anticipated that machines could listen to music, read books, or watch movies. The scale at which machines can consume content, and the extent to which they can remember it, might make it significantly different.

wgjordan• 3 years ago

But training an AI is really the same as me listening to the music. The problem occurs if I copy the music.

The trained AI model is a digital artifact that can be copied and distributed in a way that 'me listening to the music' cannot. The model contains detailed information about copyrighted content in a format capable of reconstituting infringing derivative works from a suitable prompt. It's 'really the same as' a huge content archive stored in a proprietary format with some lossy compression.

The problem occurs if I copy the music.

Yes, I would argue that the 'problem' (copyright infringement) occurs when a trained AI model (essentially a big content archive) is copied and publicly distributed. For a hosted service, I would argue that the infringement occurs when the service copies and distributes an infringing derivative work in response to a prompt.

mbesto• 3 years ago

UMG spokesperson told the FT: “We have a moral...

Fancy coming from UMG sitting on the moral high ground that they do... /s

cloudking• 3 years ago

Prediction: regulation will require AI companies to have copyright licenses granted for training data. There will be legal models trained on datasets that have copyright granted, and illegal black market models trained on copyrighted materials. However, it will be really difficult to enforce and prove what data was used for training in each.

kneebonian2• 3 years ago

Further predicition: There will be a certification process that will be required to prove you only used data you have legally obtained. Running or hosting a model will be grounds for a fine, or possible criminal penalties.

mtillman2• 3 years ago

A certification would happen in the EU first.

mock-possum• 3 years ago

I think it’ll be more like using samples in music - probably not a big deal until you’re making a bunch of money, and then people come after you for licensing fees.

metry• 3 years ago

This could be true.

oh_sigh2• 3 years ago

Prediction: clean room AI will forever lag behind AI that hoovers up whatever data it can get it's hands on.

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

It won't matter if using the output has sufficient risk. Go ahead and train that model on Disney content and sell the results, then see what happens.

joshspankit2• 3 years ago

Yes but also no.

Training on shite results in a pretty poor AI compared to one that’s trained on quality data. Do I think that means that quality AI will keep up with “hoover AI”? No. Hoover AI still gets you to profitability and that’s mostly what matters in a capitalist arms race.

pixl974• 3 years ago

Lets say this another way

"A Child left in an empty room is never going to get ahead of one that has experiences with everything in the world"

Anyone that thinks a clean room is going to make a valid AI, in my mind, is insane.

rvz2• 3 years ago

I'm from the future and this is true. There will certainly be AI regulations and licensed AI models and it had already happened with the Shutterstock and O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com partnership.

Stable Diffusion and the Getty Images lawsuit will end with a settlement and licensing will be the option to go with.

jquery3• 3 years ago

I'm also from the future (2028 to be precise), and enforcing copyright on AI-generated content has become near-impossible. It's working about as well as DRM has in stopping video and music piracy. There's now BitTorrent-like software for AI, which allows groups of individuals to train and run their own AI on whatever they please, and they seem to have little regard for copyright. In fact, underground music from these creators is taking off, and despite the law requiring all AI-assisted songs to cite their influences for royalty payments, they're simply refusing to comply. The music is so good that the public has no appetite for prosecuting the individuals making it. In fact, most people are using these AIs to create their own custom music stations. The old guard is stomping its gold-encrusted shoes in anger, but the youth just don't care.

There's a cool song called 'Neural Harmony.' The creators used a mixture of classical and electronic music as input, but they never disclosed the specific songs they were influenced by. This has made it impossible for the original artists to claim royalties, and yet the public can't get enough of its sick beatz.

There's even an AI-generated album called 'Digital Renaissance.' The creators claim to have used thousands of songs from various genres as inspiration, but they never provided a list of the songs or artists. The album has gained a massive following and has even been featured in several popular playlists. There was briefly an attempt to prosecute them but the case was dropped after public outcry.

mrbungie6• 3 years ago

Prediction: Some nation-state that cares nothing about IP (i.e. China) wins the AI race in this domain making these regulations totally useless.

EntrePrescott• 3 years ago

Another prediction would be: maybe Western states start blocking Chinese businesses that don't comply with their laws.

After all, China already blocks the Western businesses that don't implement the spying/surveillance measures the Chinese communist party wants.

The more the Chinese communist government continues pushing a war course against Taiwan makes that even more likely, e.g. in the context of sanctions.

gumballindie9• 3 years ago

Yeah China hasn't been respecting IP for a long time and it's still well behind. We shouldn't become China just to win a race - there are rules to the game you know? If everyone's content is stolen and resold by an AI then why would anyone want to create content?

wokwokwok• 3 years ago

Funny, they seem to be more proactive about putting laws around it there already (1), and that hasn't stopped progress at all, while protecting the vested interests they care about.

If only our law makers were so capable of a) understanding whats going on and b) actually passing laws when it mattered.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/china...

throwaway2902• 3 years ago

Have you checked on the state of AI in China lately? It might be enlightening if you think there's some sort of arms race going on, or anything even close to that.

Also, if you follow through your logic you are arguing for abolishing all laws in the US that constrain US companies if some other countries can ignore these laws and get the upper hand. Keep in mind that these laws (like intellectual property, copyright, patents) is the reason US has innovated so much in the first place

vkou3• 3 years ago

Western AI currently doesn't respect IP, as it scrapes the web, and turns it into proprietary model weights, with zero attribution, and with zero compliance with the wishes of the original IP's owners.

newswasboring6• 3 years ago

And they will deserve to. The point of copyright wasn't to bar anyone from using any work anywhere. It was to encourage artists to create art. Doing it by protecting the work they create was just a mechanism. The current mechanism of almost perpetual copyrights and just constant nagging over things which don't include a recognizable semblance of the original work is just insanity.

winternett2• 3 years ago

Prediction: Hacks will flood spotify, youtube, and social sites with terrible cheap shoddy songs titled as if they are made by actual artists and the platforms will dish out royalties meant for authentic artists to total frauds. Real musicians may possibly abandon mega-music platforms altogether, and implement more secure (direct sales) platforms on their own web sites...

Big platforms really are not helpful nor respectful to musicians, especially musicians that are working hard to be discovered. It's a total shame that shotify charges musicians to be promoted on their platform while giving a ton of royalties away to so many fraudulent actors every year.

mrtksn• 3 years ago

I think we will settle on proprietary AI required to obtain licenses on trained data. Any model trained on public domain data will be completely public domain too.

So I imagine, someone will train a model to do high end law work and they will have to train it on the data produced by the people they hire to create it.

This of course assumes that the society will have the same structure as of today. What I actually think it will happen is, we will completely delegate all our work to machines and the concepts of ownership will vanish as everything for exception of land will be in abundance. I imagine in the future we will fight each other over apartments in cool areas or trade it for some kind of social credit which we generate by impressing other humans. No apartment will be worse than the other but the proximity natural wonders, cultural centres and networks will be the paramount. After all, it's all about how we pick our sexual mates and social status.

I'm sorry you don't like it but There's no way the society functions the same once resources and servants are in abundance. Your bank account is relevant only when there's a scarcity and the current scarcity can be gone once machines are autonomous in enough areas to convert the material all around us into things we need using the practically limitless energy from the sun.

rvba• 3 years ago

I wonder if some sort of copyright traps cannot be created? Fake music pieces.

Map-makers use arificial "trap streets" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street ) to show that their maps were copied. Dictionaries add fictious entries ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry ).

Similar idea could be used with music?

SMAAART• 3 years ago

oytis• 3 years ago

AI leaders will be located in China or India then.

wefarrell• 3 years ago

This could be a boon for publishers since they'll be able to act as the gatekeepers of almost all professionally produced content.

kouteiheika• 3 years ago

Or companies will just move to a country where training on copyrighted data is 100% legal and allowed (like e.g. in Japan which had an explicit amendment to its copyright law to allow it), although it'll be interesting to see how such models would be treated internationally.

kmeisthax4• 3 years ago

The EU also had its copyright law amended to allow data mining on copyrighted data sets. And I would not be surprised if US courts decide that training an AI is fair use. The goal, after all, is to create a machine that draws new images.

MikusR• 3 years ago

Prediction: that will lead to a couple huge copyright guzzlers that will sue everyone trying to enter their market.

rvz2• 3 years ago

Wait hang on, the AI bros want their 'fair use' back and want to freely generate their AI models on copyrighted music, for redistribution without permission from the record labels.

Not this time.

Not with the music and records industry which has deep pockets and isn't tired of litigation. Google themselves wouldn't even risk it either.

sebzim4500• 3 years ago

The record labels have deep pockets but so do tech companies/VCs. This one isn't going to be settled by a competition of who can throw more money at the problem, it will be settled as it should be: a mostly arbitrary decision by some a 75 year old judge who doesn't really understand what is going on.

blibble14• 3 years ago

75 year old judge:

so you take their work, pay them nothing and then use that to output something which then competes with the original work?

sounds like the opposite of "fair use" to me!

xbar• 3 years ago

That is surely going to work.

jacknews3• 3 years ago

LOL. Horse, bolted. Already roaming free.

1970-01-01• 3 years ago

Roaming free and doing coke with her best friend, Privacy.

blibble14• 3 years ago

that's fine, we can use copyright law to go after everyone that's ever used or operated a AI model that was built on unlicensed works

my work has been ingested into copilot, so every line that copilot has ever output is an unauthorised derivative of my work

if the fair-use question is settled in the way I think it will be: I personally I plan to go after every single person/entity that's ever published code using copilot

$150,000 an infringement, isn't it?

(and if it isn't, well that's the end of copyright entirely)

3dfan• 3 years ago

Soon AI will not need a lot of training data anymore.

Anybody will be able to let their computer listen to one Metallica record and say "Do you hear this? This is called heavy metal. Can you make an album like this? With distorted guitars, a screaming singer and heavy drums?" and the AI will understand the whole concept and make a new heavy metal album.

atuladhar• 3 years ago

But where do you think such an AI will come from? It will be able to do that only because it will have been trained on a lot of data.

wincy• 3 years ago

So people will just lie and say they came up with it. Problem solved. Lots of lying.

shadowgovt6• 3 years ago

Well, they're welcome to try.

If there's a potential for it to be fair-use, the researcher can scrape the data any way they can get their hands on it. Universal is certainly able to ask specific channels to refrain from facilitating this use case, but that won't stop the training (it'll just make it necessary to go through the analog hole and slow it down a bit).

HlessClaudesman• 3 years ago

Yup, copyright enthusiasts can hobble a few specific applications but everyone else will just switch to more customisable / performant models with no training attribution or fingerprinting.

Users are going to gravitate to whatever works best, and ever twas it thus.

cfiggers• 3 years ago

Maybe the answer is to make every individual instance of a copyrighted work in an AI's training set a full breach of copyright, for each monetized/monetizable inference made by the trained AI. Maybe Open AI alone has already racked up quadrillions of dollars in back damages.

shadowgovt6• 3 years ago

Quintillions, even.

The beauty of monetizing ideas is you can assign any dollar value you want to them, because the whole idea that ideas have dollar values is, itself, a made-up idea.

gumballindie9• 3 years ago

Excellent. Now do software. Open or closed, companies _must_ respect licensing terms in order to incorporate code in their products. They resell it without permission in most cases.

jbb_hn• 3 years ago

I get that they need to try to do this.

However, it seems they learned nothing from the Napster/mp3 era.

The genie is out of the bottle. Movie industry will follow suit to try and prevent script writing in "the style of <insert director here>"

londons_explore2• 3 years ago

Horse doors stable bolted?

hn8305823• 3 years ago

If it's derivative and transformative, is it actually a copyright violation?

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 3 years ago

Please buy a CD and use that for training. Don't train your AI to produce mp3 compression artefacts.

eternalban• 3 years ago

I’ve seen a specific hex string used in a robots.txt equivalent in one of the big players’ repos. It may have been an openAi or Meta repo on prompt fine-tunings but can’t recall which atm.

Universal Music Asks Streaming Services to Block AI Access to Its Songs

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