Generative AI Reaches Fork in the Road (Guest Column)

Artificial intelligence holds incredible promise, and music creators are first in line to explore how far these tools and innovations can take us.

At the same time, like any new technology, artificial intelligence has risks, and music creators are also working first in line to ensure that it is developed in legal, responsible ways that respect individual autonomy and expand human creativity and potential.

However, today, a year and a half after the launch of the first mass-market AI services, we still don't know whether AI's promise or risk will win out.

Too many developers and investors seem to see a zero-sum game – where AI behemoths erase the lives of artists and songwriters from the internet for free and without any opportunity for individual choice, autonomy or values. Where most of us see music, art and culture being cherished, they see inanimate data being copied, 'branded' and exploited. Where most of us try to collaborate and find new horizons, they prefer to exploit art and culture for their own narrow gains. On the road to the future of artificial intelligence society, it's their way or not.

At the top of the list of irresponsible developers are two music production services, Suno and Udio, which claim to offer the ability to create “new” music based on simple text prompts – a feat only possible because these models have copied and exploit man. -created music on a mass scale without authorization. Both have clearly chosen the low road of secretive, inappropriate scraping and exploitation of copyrighted creative works over the road of licensing and collaboration.

To address this abhorrent behavior, a group of music companies today filed lawsuits against Suno and Udio in federal court in Boston and New York, respectively. These lawsuits seek to stop the companies' industrial-scale hacking and steer genetic AI back down a sane, responsible, legal path.

Suno and Udio clearly recognize the business risks they are taking, going to great lengths to avoid transparency and refusing to reveal even the most obvious evidence of how copyrighted works were exploited or even tell us show which works they have copied and used. If they really believed their own “fair use” rhetoric, if they really believed what they were doing was legal, would they be working so hard to hide the ball?

The worst part is that these are multi-million dollar companies funded by the deepest pockets in the world who know the long-term value that music brings to their projects and can afford to pay fair prices for it. they just don't want to. They willingly invest massive sums in computers and engineering, but want to get the most important ingredient – ​​high-quality human creativity – for free.

It's a deeply short-sighted gamble – and one that has a history of failure. Early Internet services that relied on similar arguments and failed to get a pre-launch license are the ones that took off most spectacularly. Meanwhile, digital streamers who have partnered with artists and rights holders to license and co-innovate a healthy, sustainable market are the leading global music services today.

And it's completely unnecessary. Music creators are reaching out and leaning into opportunities in AI that support both innovation and the rights of artists and songwriters, and have reached out to partner and license responsible AI companies.

Over the past year, Sony, Warner and Universal have used creative AI tools to deliver breathtaking new moments with iconic artists such as The beetles, Roberta Flackand David Gilmour and the Orb, all with appropriate cooperation and consent. Music labels have partnered with cutting-edge ethical AI companies such as BandLab, Ed and SoundLabs. And singer/songwriter Randy Travis used artificial intelligence to record his first new song since he largely lost his voice following a stroke in 2013.

However, AI platforms should not mistake the music community's embrace of AI as a willingness to accept ongoing mass infringement. While free market partnerships are the best way forward, we will not allow the status quo of scraping and copying artists' creative heritage without permission to go unchallenged. As in the past, music creators will enforce their rights to protect the creative engine of human art and enable the development of a healthy and sustainable licensing market that recognizes the value of both creativity and technology.

Generative AI holds great promise. But to realize it will require cooperation, collaboration and a genuine respect for human creativity. It's time for AI companies to choose – go nowhere alone or explore a rich, amazing future together.

Mitch Glazier is President and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).