Billie Eilish, Katy Perry and 200 artists accuse AI of «devaluing music».

A group of musicians and songwriters demanded that big tech stop using AI to infringe on their rights and devalue their work

More than 200 artists, including Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Pearl Jam and Katy Perry, called on tech giants to stop using artificial intelligence to infringe their rights. In a letter titled «Stop devaluing music», the authors accused the companies of devaluing creativity.

«Make no mistake: we believe that when used responsibly, AI has enormous potential to promote human creativity in a way that enables the development and growth of new and exciting experiences for music fans,» they state. «Unfortunately, some platforms and developers use AI to sabotage creativity and undermine artists, songwriters, musicians and rights holders.»

The artists charged against tech companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. While not mentioning them by name, they did express that «the biggest and most powerful companies» use their work to train AI models without asking permission. «These efforts are aimed at replacing the work of human artists with massive amounts of AI-created sounds and images,» they said.

The chart includes names such as Cake, Imagine Dragons, Bon Jovi, Camilla Cabello and Robert Smith. Latin personalities such as Luis Fonsi, Juanes, Banda El Recodo de Don Cruz Lizarraga, and J Balvin have also signed on. The musicians warned that if left unchecked, AI will degrade the value of their work and prevent them from receiving compensation. «For many artists and songwriters, who are trying to make ends meet, this would be catastrophic,» they added.

«We call on all AI developers, technology companies, platforms and digital music services to commit not to develop or deploy AI music generation content or tools that undermine or replace the human artistry of composers and artists or deny us fair compensation for our work.»

Artists warn that AI will replace them sooner or later

The artists’ request comes at a crucial moment in the development of artificial intelligence. A few weeks ago, Adobe introduced a tool that can create melodies from text input. Project Music GenAI Control is a Photoshop for music that uses AI to generate songs and is able to edit, mix or extend them.

Copilot, on the other hand, can also create music of different genres from a prompt. Microsoft’s artificial intelligence added support for Suno, an application that uses generative AI to produce melodies. In one experiment, we asked Suno to generate a reggaeton song about the queen’s infidelities, and the result left us cold.

Singers and songwriters are the latest to join the battle against artificial intelligence, which they accuse of violating their rights. The argument is similar to the one put forward by artists who sued Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for training their models with their works without asking for permission. There is also the writers’ group led by George R. R. Martin (Song of Fire and Ice), who sued ChatGPT for systematic theft on a massive scale.

«This attack on human creativity must be stopped. We must protect ourselves against the predatory use of AI to steal voices and portraits of professional artists, violate the rights of creators and destroy the music ecosystem,» they demanded in their letter.

In contrast, OpenAI claims it is impossible to create an AI without violating copyright. Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, said it would be impossible to train leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.

Altman added that all types of human expression are currently protected by copyright.

Hi I’m Anastasia and I write about AI tips, tricks and tools, especially Midjourney !
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