Universal Music Group (UMG) has appealed to streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to limit AI-based services from extracting melodies and lyrics from its copyrighted songs.
UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, is increasingly concerned that AI-powered bots are using its songs to learn to create music that resembles the work of popular artists.
AI-generated songs appear on streaming services, and UMG sends out requests to limit them. The company is asking streaming companies to block access to its music catalog for developers who use its artificial intelligence model training.
“This next generation of technology creates serious problems,” said a person familiar with the situation. “Most of the [генеративного ИИ] trained in popular music. You could say, write a song where the lyrics are like Taylor Swift but the vocals are Bruno Mars, but I want the theme to be more Harry Styles. The result you get is based on AI being trained to work on the intellectual property of these artists.”
For example, YouTube channel PluggingAI shares tracks that sound like Kanye West singing songs by The Weeknd or SZA. The website drayk.it allowed users to enter a description and receive a clip similar to Drake performing a song. It was closed a few months ago.
The MusicLM model developed by Google is also capable of generating music from a textual description. This model is trained on a dataset of 280,000 hours of music. Although Google abandoned the launch of the service when its researchers discovered the risk of potential illegal appropriation of creative content. As it turned out, about 1% of the music created is a direct copy of works protected by copyright. The company is committed to improving MusicLM to address these risks.
UMG is making efforts to remove “lower quality” songs from streaming platforms, including ambient music and AI-generated songs.
“We have become aware that some artificial intelligence systems may have been trained to work with copyrighted content without obtaining the necessary consent or compensation from the rights holders who own or produce the content,” UMG told streaming services last month.
Spotify and Apple did not comment on this information.
Source: arstechnica
