Love this video from Adam Neely about the Ed Sheeran case vs Marvin Gaye (well actually vs SAS investment banker trying it on, Ed Townsend died years ago). I do think it’s a stretch, as a mashup artist I’ve heard so many things like that, it’s not a direct lift. You cannot own a genre!
Yet this article isn’t totally about that, but something else mentioned in the video – the idea of many more credits for influence, style and vibe, and that the basis of copyright, using Western scales and notation and outdated ideas is fundamentally broken. It will get a LOT worse with Artificial Intelligence generating music, as it is with the AI image generation and the rest.
I do think royalty, copyright et al needs to change radically now Artificial Intelligence is upon us, and style is being copied blatantly like ‘give me a Eminem or Drake song in their voice’ level stuff. Because it’s not fair that my art is used within those databases and I get $0 from it – in fact I am expect to PAY to use Midjourney et al. (This is why in my Artificial Intelligence exploits I only use prompts of non-living artists and refuse to pay as a protest…fuck them).
And maybe something citational or ‘micro-credits’ or some such, or automatic credits on using a prompt in an artist’s style is the way. Because otherwise, the future looks grim. But not in ways that have been previously framed….
All these clickbait articles about ‘Will Artificial Intelligence put artists out of a job?’ are not only missing the fact that we’ve been here before, they are missing the point. No, it won’t. Artists will find a way, a spot, a niche. It’s what we do.
What it might do is kill those clone-able cultures themselves. So yes, it might make say, pop music a generic Artificial Intelligence desert. Artists will shift to things that Artificial Intelligence can’t do – same thing happened after photography; with representational art being quickly abandoned for the abstract. I think that some cultures might go the way of the dusty Victorian genre pictures or the grand representational oil portrait – devalued or made into posh throwback niches.
But is that a good thing? To take the human out of the art forms that can be copied by machine? And who will put the Ghost back in the Machine, the human when the humans have stopped doing that thing that Artificial Intelligence copied so well? Without new art in that genre or area, Artificial Intelligence will become stale and die, but without the benefits trickling down to the actual real-world artists, they won’t create the new art and do something else, and thus we spiral down to zero.
Now in some industries I have gone on the record as saying I think they should be mechanised, a bit like the engravers of old, who the fuck should be sitting there transcribing audio by hand in the 21st century, or churning out endless photos of women laughing at salad? (Although the AI version of the latter is terrifying). Technology should take the drudgy boring tasks. But as people have pointed out, it’s being posited to keep humans doing the McJobs while the AI does the fun stuff (but it cannot create new things, only copy what has gone before, so how does that work?).
This is the wrong way around, surely?
And yes, I think there is a risk of what I am calling the generic loop which I have detailed previously on social media, that there is a high likelihood that AI Will Eat Itself into a generic singularity. It feeds on new image and content online – but it needs new ideas to grow it’s machine learning, and now Artificial Intelligence-generated content is evading the tools to detect it, there’s a high likelihood it will be trained on more Artificial Intelligence content to a point it will accelerate it’s quirks or generic nature to Maximum Beige.
So what does this have to do with Ed Sheeran? Well if we had a good system and framework where influence, style, vibe and derivative works were encouraged but also cited and rewarded in some way, then I think both silly lawsuits and the AI negative ‘storm’ will go away. Sadly I don’t think the Big Bad Copyright Orgs and the corporates will go down without a fight over this..but sadly I think they might in the end be destroyed by their own monster.
Also as Adam Neely points out, we’ll get many more of these style/vibe lawsuits as AI becomes big business. Who is in the dock if an AI machine recreates Marvin Gaye – the machine? The service? The person using the prompt? Who even actually owns it?
And yes that means the possibility of legal mashups, DJ mixes and AI work being rewarded (and flagged as being not the seed artist’s own creation, because like with political deep fakes, the idea that you can now put words in people’s mouths convincingly is rather dangerous, and I don’t know how we stop the abuse of that? Because that can go way beyond a fun cartoon profile picture into propaganda, stalking and abuse).
And there’s more here about why this lawsuit makes no sense:
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