Billie Eilish, CAKE, J Balvin, Imagine Dragons, Jadakiss, Katy Perry, Kim Petras, Pearl Jam: they are all on an urgent letter against AI. Artificial intelligence makes many people, especially in the creative industry, afraid of losing their jobs: you can create images with Dall-E, videos soon with Sora and making music with AI can also be done in an instant. The musicians argue that AI dishonors their work.
Artist Rights Alliance against AI
The Artist Rights Alliance (ARA) decided to speak out about the increasing extent to which AI is impacting the music industry. We previously wrote that Spotify is fighting hard against the arrival of AI music on the platform, but artists themselves are also against it. Stevie Wonder, Nicki Minaj and more artists signed this call to AI developers, tech companies and digital music services. AI must stop because it would infringe on the rights of human artists. If things continue like this with AI, human artists may disappear, says ARA.
The project did not come completely out of the blue: ever since AI became more visible through image generators in 2022, there has been a lot of opposition. Not only because it steals the work of the creative sector, but also because it is often trained on the work of those same artists. And not always in the most legal way. Last year, for example, actors took to the streets to protest against the arrival of AI in the film world. Although the strike has now been resolved by certain promises from Hollywood, OpenAI is indeed taking its video-making AI to all kinds of Hollywood bigwigs this week.
Urgent letter from the music industry
The question is to what extent fire letters help: even the people who signed the fire letter from tech experts last year are often also busy developing AI themselves. It doesn’t seem to stop anymore. But it can be given more frameworks in the form of legislation and regulations: agreements with each other. The musicians’ letter states: “We call on all AI developers, tech companies, platforms and digital music services to commit not to develop or integrate AI music-generating technology, content or tools that undermine or undermine the human art of songwriters or artists replace, or refuse fair compensation for our work.”
Although AI has long been out in the open, that certainly does not mean that this urgent letter comes too late. Although AI to generate music was not necessarily very good for a long time, it is learning every minute and is now starting to become much better and therefore more widely used. It’s just a difficult ethical issue for people who can make that software: they in turn can make money with it, and they don’t make anything by making promises to the music industry.
Ethical issue
The question is whether the urgent letter will make much difference: it is an important statement from such a large industry, one that may make listeners think. Also important, because if people consciously no longer listen to AI music, then there is little point in creating it. However, the same applies here as with the developers of that technology: it only takes a small group to do it and it will continue to exist.
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