Artists are calling on tech companies not to train AI models on music

About two hundred mostly American artists have called on tech companies not to train AI models on copyrighted music. That would threaten artists’ incomes.

The artists, under the banner of Artists Rights Alliance, want tech companies to promise not to create tools that replace human work in music and threaten artists’ incomes. “These efforts are directly aimed at replacing the work of human artists with massive amounts of AI-created ‘sounds’ and ‘visuals’ that could significantly reduce the royalties paid to artists.”

Among the artists who have signed are the heirs of old artists such as Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra, but also Smokey Robison and Billie Eilish. Many of the artists mentioned are not or hardly known in the Benelux.

There are already initiatives to provide AI models with authorized training data under the name Fairly Trained. Companies train many AI models on material taken from the internet without prior permission. There are likely to be court decisions that will determine whether this will continue to be allowed.