A set of 200 musicians signed an open letter calling on tech companies and developers not to undermine human creativity with AI music production tools.
The list of signed artists below is so full of power and breadth that it could make for a great Coachella lineup — it includes Billie Eilish, the Bob Marley estate, Chappell Roan, Elvis Costello, Greta Van Fleet, Imagine Dragons, Jon Bon Jovi, the Jonas Brothers, Kacey Musgraves, Katy Perry, Mac DeMarco, Miranda Lambert, Mumford & Sons, Nicki Minaj, Noah Kahan, Pearl Jam, Sheryl Crow and Zayn Malik, among others.
“When used irresponsibly, artificial intelligence poses enormous threats to our ability to protect our privacy, our identity, our music and our livelihoods,” the letter said. “Some of the biggest and most powerful companies are using our work without permission to train artificial intelligence models. … For many working musicians, artists and songwriters who are just trying to make ends meet, this would be devastating.”
These artists are right. The AI models that create new music, artwork, and writing work by training on massive datasets of existing work, and in most cases, asking to remove your work from these models is an exercise in futility. It would be like one of these artists trying to stop anyone from pirating their music — it’s just not realistic. It’s already possible to make convincing deepfakes of popular artists, and the technology will continue to improve.
Some companies like Adobe and Stability AI are working on AI music generators that use licensed or royalty-free music. But even these tools could negatively impact artists who score TV commercials or other beats an artist might sponsor for their work.
Historically, musicians have gotten the short end of the stick as technology has become more and more sophisticated. First, it was file sharing that made it easy to download music for free. Streaming emerged as an answer to this issue, but it is not one that satisfies artists. The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) has spent years working to secure better streaming payments for artists — the union’s artists estimate that Spotify’s average streaming royalty rate is about $0.0038, or about a quarter of a cent. So it makes sense that musicians remain skeptical of this emerging technology.
The authors have also taken a stand against the rise of genetic artificial intelligence. In July, more than 15,000 authors — including James Patterson, Michael Chabon, Suzanne Collins, Roxane Gay and others — signed a similar open letter, addressed to the CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM and Microsoft.
“These technologies are imitating and reinstating our language, stories, style and ideas. “Millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays and poetry provide the ‘fodder’ for artificial intelligence systems, endless meals for which there is no account,” the authors letter reads.
But these tech companies aren’t listening. You can still go to ChatGPT and ask him to create a Margaret Atwood-style quote — it’s not necessarily good, but it shows that the great language model has swallowed “The Handmaid’s Tale” and can spit out a degraded version of it. And since copyright law isn’t necessarily sophisticated enough to deal with genetic AI, legal recourse is pretty useless at this point.
“This assault on human creativity must stop,” the musicians’ letter reads. “We need to protect ourselves from the aggressive use of artificial intelligence to steal the voices and likenesses of professional artists, infringe on creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem.”
