The steel-driving man John Henry of American legend attempted to beat the machine and lost. Today, new technologies are steaming past America’s top musicians and up the charts, but instead of railway ties, they are dropping beats.
Multiple streaming platforms have taken down a new viral AI-generated song featuring vocals reminiscent of both Drake’s and the Weeknd’s respective styles.
Although the musicians and their parent label Universal Music Group appear to have gotten their way in silencing the track, it’s not clear whether they have a legitimate copyright claim or the right to do so. There are other recently released songs incorporating AI-generated celebrity sound-alikes that have been easy targets for complaints and removal since they contained borrowed instrumentation, lyrics, or other components that were copyright-protected.
For instance, Rihanna’s voice was mimicked in a transmogrified version of the Beyoncé hit “Cuff It.” Even if Rihanna proved incapable of taking legal action, Beyoncé and her label certainly were in a position to do so.
The 2-minute, 14-second song that made waves this week is, however, an original composition.
Michael Inouye, an analyst at ABI Research, told CNN that “AI could also have generated most of the song, lyrics and replicated the artists again based on the training data set and any prompts given to direct the AI model.”
UMG complained and successfully had Ghostwriter977’s song all but scrubbed from the internet.
“With that said, however, the training of generative AI using our artists’ music (which represents both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law) as well as the availability of infringing content created with generative AI on DSPs, begs the question as to which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation,” added the corporate giant.
There are presently lawsuits tackling the issue of AI systems using copyrighted works as inputs.
The results of such legal actions may set a precedent applicable to the release of songs like Ghostwriter977’s, where potentially copyrighted content served to train AI models to create a novel product.
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