Nicki Minaj, Billie Eilish, Katy Perry and other musicians sign a letter against irresponsible AI

A gaggle of 200 musicians signed an open letter urging tech corporations and developers to not undermine human creativity with AI music generation tools.

The list of signing artists is so extensive and diverse that it could make for an awesome Coachella lineup – including Billie Eilish, the Bob Marley successor, Chappell Roan, Elvis Costello, Greta Van Fleet, Imagine Dragons and 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, amongst others.

“If used irresponsibly, AI poses an incredible threat to our ability to guard our privacy, our identity, our music and our livelihoods,” the letter said. “Some of the most important and strongest corporations are using our work without permission to coach AI models. … This could be a disaster for a lot of working musicians, artists and songwriters just attempting to make ends meet.”

These artists are right. The AI ​​models that generate recent music, artwork and lyrics work by training on massive datasets of existing work, and generally asking you to remove your work from these models is an exercise in futility. It could be like one in every of these artists trying to stop anyone from pirating their music – that is just not realistic. It’s already possible to create convincing deepfakes of popular artists, and the technology is simply convalescing.

Some corporations 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 creating scores for television commercials or other beats that an artist might license for his or her work.

Historically, musicians have all the time lost out as technology has grow to be more sophisticated. First, it was file sharing that made it easy to get free music; Streaming proved to be an answer to this problem, however it will not be an answer that satisfies artists. The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) has been working for years to secure higher streaming compensation for artists – the guild’s artists estimate that Spotify’s average streaming royalty rate is around 50% $0.0038, or a couple of quarter of a cent. So it is smart that musicians remain skeptical of this recent technology.

Authors have also spoken out against the rise of generative AI. In July, over 15,000 authors – including James Patterson, Michael Chabon, Suzanne Collins, Roxane Gay and others – signed an analogous open letter addressed to the CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM and Microsoft.

“These technologies mimic our language, stories, style and concepts and convey them back to life. “Millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays and poems provide the ‘food’ for AI systems, limitless meals for which there isn’t a bill,” say the authors. letter reads.

But these tech corporations aren’t listening. You can still go to ChatGPT and ask it to provide a Margaret Atwood-style passage – that is not necessarily good, however it does indicate that the good language model has absorbed “The Handmaid’s Tale” and may spit out a degraded version of it It. And since copyright law is not necessarily sophisticated enough to take care of generative AI, legal recourse is pretty useless at this point.

“This attack on human creativity have to be stopped,” the musicians said of their letter. “We must protect ourselves from the predatory use of AI to steal the voices and likenesses of skilled artists, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem.”