Universal Music Group to Fight Artificial Intelligence That Produces ‘Creepy’ Songs

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by Damir Yalalov

Published: April 13, 2023 at 1:30 pm Updated: April 13, 2023 at 1:30 pm

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Universal Music Group (UMG) is fighting an unexpected battle against artificial intelligence (AI) services that use copyrighted music to craft creepy, new songs that look like popular artists. The emergence of AI-created songs on streaming services has forced UMG to take action to protect the intellectual property rights of its artists. UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, is sending takedown requests to streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, and urging them to block AI developers from accessing their catalogs.

AI services that enable people to create songs based on their favorite artists have appeared online for some time. Generative AI technology can create songs that combine lyrics, vocals, and themes from different artists, resulting in potential copyright infringement. Examples of such AI-generated content include the “PluggingAI” YouTube page and the drayk.it website, which allowed users to create Drake songs with custom sounds.

Although AI is providing consumers with more options and creating new opportunities, it is also potentially causing copyright infringement. Google’s “MusicLM” is an AI system that generates music based on text descriptions. Unfortunately, MusicLM has not been released due to concerns about possible misappropriation of creative content. According to a study, about 1% of the music generated by MusicLM is a direct copy of copyrighted works.

In order to protect their intellectual property, UMG is sending takedown requests to streaming services and asking them to block AI developers from accessing their catalogs. UMG also demands that companies adhere to copyright policies and not use AI to generate music. By taking these steps, UMG is hoping to send a message to the entire music industry that AI-generated music should not be tolerated and that a company’s intellectual property should be respected and protected.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) launched a similar initiative in the fall of 2022, which directly condemned the use of protected copyright music for training AI models by piracy.

The use of generative AI technology is growing rapidly, but it is important that the music industry is vigilant in protecting intellectual property. This is why it is important for UMG to take a stand against AI-created music that infringes on copyright.

• In January, Google introduced MusicLM, a model for generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions. It is trained on a large corpus of musical scores and can generate music in various genres, including classical, jazz, and rock. It is an important development in the field of AI-generated music, as it can generate long music generations of up to five minutes.
• The US Copyright Office (USCO) has stated that any images generated by existing generative AI models cannot be protected by copyright laws in the US. The USCO emphasizes the importance of human creativity in determining whether a work can be granted copyright protection and examines whether the AI model’s contribution to the work was the result of a “mechanical reproduction” or if it represented the author’s own creative conception.

Read more about AI:

• Training AI and the Water Crisis: A Look at the Surprising Connection Between ChatGPT and Water Usage
• Researchers at the University of California Created the Machiavelli Benchmark for Measuring the Competence and Harmfulness of AI Models
• Researchers at the University of California Created the Machiavelli Benchmark for Measuring the Competence and Harmfulness of AI Models

About The Author

Damir is the team leader, product manager, and editor at Metaverse Post, covering topics such as AI/ML, AGI, LLMs, Metaverse, and Web3-related fields. His articles attract a massive audience of over a million users every month. He appears to be an expert with 10 years of experience in SEO and digital marketing. Damir has been mentioned in Mashable, Wired, Cointelegraph, The New Yorker, Inside.com, Entrepreneur, BeInCrypto, and other publications. He travels between the UAE, Turkey, Russia, and the CIS as a digital nomad. Damir earned a bachelor's degree in physics, which he believes has given him the critical thinking skills needed to be successful in the ever-changing landscape of the internet. 

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Damir Yalalov

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Damir Yalalov

Damir is the team leader, product manager, and editor at Metaverse Post, covering topics such as AI/ML, AGI, LLMs, Metaverse, and Web3-related fields. His articles attract a massive audience of over a million users every month. He appears to be an expert with 10 years of experience in SEO and digital marketing. Damir has been mentioned in Mashable, Wired, Cointelegraph, The New Yorker, Inside.com, Entrepreneur, BeInCrypto, and other publications. He travels between the UAE, Turkey, Russia, and the CIS as a digital nomad. Damir earned a bachelor's degree in physics, which he believes has given him the critical thinking skills needed to be successful in the ever-changing landscape of the internet. 

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