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An AI Singer-Songwriter Just Debuted Her Original Song—And The Responses Are Just Brutal
(www.comicsands.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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The fact that AI can produce this is impressive as to where we have come with AI. But can this actually threaten human artists?
~~https://www.makeuseof.com/copyright-rules-ai-art/~~ See u/[email protected] 's article below.
Under current US law, that song is probably now in the public domain. If the law changes, that could mean that in the future, music charts potentially could be filled with AI songs. As it stands, this is most-likely a public domain music machine cranking out music that anyone can use royalty-free. It depends on the interpretation of the courts.
You should cite this article instead. It's more up-to-date.
Fair enough,
The threshold for how much human input counts as "authorship" is extremely low. Photographers get copyright over pictures they take when their sole contribution to the image is aiming the camera and pushing a button. Most AI-generated art involves a lot of human input in the form of prompting, selecting outputs, and then often tweaking or splicing them together in various ways.
But even if by some weird twist US courts do rule this sort of thing to be public domain, why wouldn't this "threaten human artists?" Having awesome AI-generated art being public domain seems like the best of both worlds to me - you get awesome art and it's legally unencumbered. How would a human artist compete with that? Their art would be more expensive and you'd have all kinds of limitations on what you can do with it.
If the autogenerated art becomes too close to copyrighted art, then you'll have humans suing AI generators.
George Harrison's My Sweet Lord is very similar to He's So Fine by the Chiffons. And that was an easy case. But some cases in requires deeper analysis, such as Lana Del Ray's Get Free.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190605-nine-most-notorious-copyright-cases-in-music-history
If AI is sampling, then how do you defend it being unintentional? While all Radiohead sought was credit on the writing (in this case), would humans (whose livelihood is being threatened) be so generous with an AI composition? And if the music industry is threatened by AI, they will lawyer up.
The mistake you are making is in thinking that the future of media will rely on the same infrastructure as what it's been historically.
Media is evolving from being a product, where copyright matters in protecting your product from duplication, to being a service where any individual work is far less valuable because of the degree to which it is serving a niche market.
Look at how many of the audio money makers on streaming platforms are defined by their genre rather than a specific work. Lofi Girl or ASMR made a ton of money, but there's not a single specific work that is what made them popular like with a typical recording artist with a hit song.
The future of something like Spotify will not be a handful of AI artists creating hit singles you and everyone else want to listen to, but AI artists taking the music you uniquely love to listen to and extending it in ways that are optimized around your individual preferences like a personalized composer/performer available 24/7 at low cost.
In that world, copyright for AI produced works really doesn't matter for profitability, because AI creation has been completely commoditized.
So old characters such as Mickey Mouse are all fine to use as the authors are dead?
The authors may be dead, but they did exist. The work had an author.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
If you're going to use a character some human ever created, hire a lawyer. The House of Mouse has their own lawyers.
Nah fuck that, pirate Mickey and other cultural works.
I bet they didn't consider this one when writing the law!