Submitted 3 months ago by hotpot8toe@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
“Suno’s training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet.”
“Rather than trying to argue that Suno was not trained on copyrighted songs, the company is instead making a Fair Use argument to say that the law should allow for AI training on copyrighted works without permission or compensation.”
Archived (also bypass paywall): https://archive.ph/ivTGs
There’s nothing stopping you from going to youtube, listening to a bunch of hit country songs there, and using that inspiration to write a “hit country song about getting your balls caught in a screen door”. That music was free to access, and your ability to create derivative works is fully protected by copyright law.
So if that’s what the AI is doing, then it would be fully legal if it was a person. The question courts are trying to figure out is if AI should be treated like people when it comes to “learning” and creating derivative works.
I think there are good arguments to both sides of that issue. The big advantage of ruling against AI having those rights is that it means that record labels and other rights holders can get compensation for their content being used. The main disadvantage is that high cost barriers to training material will kill off open-source and small company AI, guaranteeing that generative AI is fully controlled by tech giant companies like Google, Microsoft, and Adobe.
I think the best legal outcome is one that attempts to protect both: companies and individuals below a certain revenue threshold (or other scale metrics) can freely train on the open web, but are required to track what was used for training. As they grow, there will be different tiers where they’re required to start paying for the content their model was trained on. Obviously this solution needs a lot of work before being a viable option, but I think something similar to this is the best way to both have competition in the AI space and make sure people get compensated.
I think the solution is just that anything AI generated should be public domain.
That’s the current status quo.
If you use a tool, let’s say photoshop, to make an image, should it be of public domain? Even if the user effort here is just the prompt, it’s still a tool used by an user.
It should be fully legal because it’s still a person doing it. Like Cory Doctrow said in this article:
Break down the steps of training a model and it quickly becomes apparent why it’s technically wrong to call this a copyright infringement. First, the act of making transient copies of works – even billions of works – is unequivocally fair use. Unless you think search engines and the Internet Archive shouldn’t exist, then you should support scraping at scale: pluralistic.net/…/how-to-think-about-scraping/
Making quantitative observations about works is a longstanding, respected and important tool for criticism, analysis, archiving and new acts of creation. Measuring the steady contraction of the vocabulary in successive Agatha Christie novels turns out to offer a fascinating window into her dementia: theguardian.com/…/agatha-christie-alzheimers-rese…
The final step in training a model is publishing the conclusions of the quantitative analysis of the temporarily copied documents as software code. Code itself is a form of expressive speech – and that expressivity is key to the fight for privacy, because the fact that code is speech limits how governments can censor software: eff.org/…/remembering-case-established-code-speec…
That’s all these models are, someone’s analysis of the training data in relation to each other, not the data itself. I feel like this is where most people get tripped up. Understanding how these things work makes it all obvious.
I think AI should be allowed ti use any available data, but it has to be made freely available e.g. by making it downloadable on huggingface
Inspiration ≠ mathematically derived similarity.
These aren’t artists giving their own rendering, these are venture capitalists using shiny tools to steal other people hard work.
4 chords.
Taking other people’s creative works to create your own for profit product is illegal in every way except when AI does it. AI is not a person watching videos. AI is a product using others’ content ass it’s bricks and mortar. Thousands of hours of work on a project you completed being used by someone else to turn sa profit, maybe even used in some way you vehemently disagree with, without giving you a dime is unethical and needs regulation from that perspective.
That’s covered by section 107 of the US copyright law, and is actually fine and protected as free use in most cases. As long as the work is a direct copy and instead changes the result to be something different.
All parody type music is protected in this way, whether it’s new lyrics to a song, or even something less “creative” like performing the lyrics of song A to the melody and style of song B.
Thousands of hours of work on a project you completed being used by someone else to turn a profit, maybe even used in some way you vehemently disagree with, without giving you a dime is
exactly how human culture progresses, and trying to stop it
is unethical and needs regulation from that perspective.
Taking other people’s creative works to create your own productive work is allowed if you are making a fair use. There’s a very good argument that use such as training a model on a work would be a fair use under the current test; being a transformative use, that replicates practically no actual part of the original piece in the finished work, that (arguably) does not serve as a replacement for that specific piece in the market.
Fair use is the cornerstone of remix art, of fan art, of huge swathes of musical genres. What we are witnessing is the birth of a new technique based on remixing and unfortunately this time around people are convinced that fighting on the side of big copyright is somehow the good thing for artists.
Taking other people’s creative works to create your own for-profit product is illegal in every way except when AI does it.
wrong.
Yea, I think only big media corporations would profit from such a copyright rule Average Joe’s creations will be scraped because he has no funding to prove and sue those big AI corporations
I’m reminded of the Blue Man Group’s Complex Rock Tour. One of the major themes of the show is the contradiction in terms that is the “music industry.” That we tend to think of music as an artistic, ethereal thing that requires talent and inspiration…and yet we churn out pop music the same way we churn out cars and smart phones.
Actually, that music was based off of getting royalties and ad viewership. No one will pay for an ai to be exposed to an ad or pay royalties for an ai to hear a song. Or have an ai to hear a song for the chance of the ai buying merchandise or a concert ticket.
Say what you will, but “I Glued My Balls to My Butthole (Again)” fucking slaps.
Sadly I love that song. It resonates with my lived experience.
Link please? For research purposes, of course.
youtu.be/wPlOYPGMRws?si=Xu094G4Ta5HfeLKS
YouTube link
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPlOYPGMRws&list=OLAK5uy_…
Listen to the rest of them too. This guy is a riot. He writes the lyrics and records parts of the music to make it better than the AI can make it.
I prefer ‘I Stink’.
Why would the "AI" know about it and not just make that up though?
But also, if companies can use everything on the internet as a "fair use" thing, then so should people. No more bullying of people making stuff you don't like / agree with.
If copyright had a reasonable duration, a huge chunk of that would have been public domain and not an issue.
Abolish copyright.
I’m fine with copyright, provided it’s limited to only a few years and can’t ever be extended. This “lifetime of the author plus 50 years” shit is what makes it terrible.
Why?
Because it manufactures scarcity and causes us to repeatedly expend energy reproducing things that could be otherwise copied and enjoyed at near-zero cost.
We keep inventing silly rules in order to put off dealing with the existential threat our mode of production represents. “Copyright” is the first and silliest of those rules.
I think you have to abolish hierarchical society first. Which I also think should be done. But if you get rid of rules protecting creative endeavors before getting rid of the shitheel corporations it gets rid of creative endeavor more than it gets rid of the corporate bastards. The problem with copyright as it stands is how much the corporate bastards have twisted it over time to benefit them instead of the collective us.
You don’t have to abolish hierarchy, you just have to de-tangle work from sustenance-level resource distribution. A UBI sufficient for living would be enough. Even providing universal housing and reducing the workweek would help.
Copyright simply makes creative work profitable, but profit isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for creative work.
rules protecting creative endeavors
that’s not what copyright does.
why are comments full of AI shilling? are these bot accounts or are there still real people actually defending “AI” ““art””?
Yeah, imagine different people having different opinions than you!
on “AI art” being art, no, i don’t believe an actual human being can believe a fucking algorithm that can’t tell what itself is doing is capable of artistic expression.
Why are comments RIAA shilling?
Are you a bot?
The fuck is wrong with discourse now. This kind of comment is just embarrassing.
Because regardless of whatever data Suno trained their model on, the stuff it makes sounds like shit and won’t replace real music, just like Midjourney isn’t replacing real art.
i love suno because it proves 99% of music is not art. not all. not even close. it is entertainment at best. if suno can generate “music” for the masses this will radically reduce pollution of the planet: less bands touring, less music plattforms pushing industry produced music, less shitty texts…the world will be a better place once we acknowledge that we are not so fucking special after all. music is like food. anyone can cook, dont pretend to be ratatouille. birda even do free music their buddies vide to and no riaa in sight.
I’d say everything is art, just on different levels to different people. Or nothing is art.
I just don’t get how we can’t just sue them. You’d think the big copyright holders, record labels in this case, would be all over that.
Uhm, this came out as part of a law suit against them by the record industry? So they are in the process of being sued.
While not surprising, the admission, which was made as part of court proceedings responding to a massive recording industry lawsuit against the company, shows yet again that many AI tools are trained on, essentially, anything that companies can get their hands on.
Thank you. I‘m honestly baffled at the amount of comments talking out of their ass in this thread as if the legal system has made 0 progress or effort to deal with anything AI related by now. It‘s reminiscent of how cryptobros talked about NFTs not so long ago and how all the scammers are untouchable because laws don‘t mention NFTs directly or something. AI is the largest case of copyright infringement ever committed and labels do not give a damn about subjective and debatable transformative arguments. Again, it‘s baffling.
I can only assume they see it as a double edged sword. Rights-holders (read: publishers, labels & studios) would have the power to sue here, not creators (read: artists, musicians and filmmakers).
These rights-holders also want to use AI so they don’t have to pay creators, so while they don’t love that other companies are making money off their content, they’re more just mad that someone else did it first before they could exploit their own content in the same way.
Sue and set precedent, and they might accidentally make it impossible for them to turn around and do the exact same thing.
Entirely speculation, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.
With corps, assume malice and you’ll be right more often than not.
I think you could use a fuckin lamp
Why, is he a moth?
Oh, so when a ai company wants to use copyrighted works without permission or compensation it’s “fair use” but when I do it, it’s “piracy” and “I need to leave before the cops are called”.
Even the one where I farted the riff from “7 Nation Army” and looped it for 24 hours?
They said “All the music files”, not unholy abomination from the seventh layer of ass hell.
Ass of the beholder etc.?
You already named it aiff (Artificial Intelligence Fart File)
Just ask for it to make you a song in the “Beans and Dairy” genre
Imagine how many years of prison would get an individual if he admitted in court to pirate tens of millions of music files in order to make a profit
I mean Suno is being sued right now for this. We will see how much they have to pay if they lose
One of the four fair use factors is the portion of the copyrighted work that was taken. For a finding of fair use under this factor, the infringing work must only take the amount of copyrighted material needed for the infringing work’s purpose.
If they ripped every single file they have access to, there’s no way to be found as fair use under this factor. If they argue they were using a curated list of only the works they needed to develop their model it could be fair use, but admitting to taking every possible work in their entirety is a surefire way to fail a fair use defense.
But that’s not how model training works, it doesn’t simply copy and paste entire songs into its training data. It more or less “listens” to it, analyzes it and when you ask to create a rock song for example it just has an algorithm behind it what a song like that would sound like.
But you can’t just ask it to generate Bohemian Rhapsody from its data, it would probably get very close depending on the training, but it would never be 100% the same (except the model was only trained on this one song).
Just like you can listen to rock songs and then make your own, that’s totally valid. The problem here is of course automation and scale, but saying it’s not fair use is dubious.
Fair use is a legal doctrine relating to derivitave works based on copyrighted works. An AI model’s fair use determination would be judged by the same standards and all derivative works.
It doesn’t matter how they used the copyrighted works. This factor is about scale not intent.
There are four factors, and no single factor is determinative. But admitting their model uses as much training as possible makes their model less likely to be fair use.
Your interpretation of copyright law would be helped by reading this piece from an EFF lawyer who has actually litigated copyright cases in the past:
They’re not recreating music or selling albums. Someone called the musicians victims lol
Insane stuff
All creators should be compensated if what they created is used to make money at the very least.
If I make a song inspired by the sound of two artists, the lyrics of two other songs, and the voice of a few more, who gets the money?
I should think everybody should get a piece
Lmao, fair use… Fuck off with that in this case
I like suno because its fun to think of dumb shit to make a song over
It’s pretty obvious if you get specific with the tags. Especially with older styles where there’s less available trianing data.
Just tried it ou5 out of curiosity. It does a good job, but the music is still boring.
Imagine the amount of data that is used to train facial recognition ia.
Well, Microsoft started this line of argument recently æ. Makes sense others also adopt it
tehWrapper@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Great AI gets more rights than us too!
drmoose@lemmy.world 3 months ago
You’re free to learn from any piece of music too. Whether AI is actually learning is still debatable but you have the same rights right now.
I’m still on the edge tbh I feel like it is learning and it is transformative but it’s just too powerful for our current copyright framework.
Either way, that’ll be such a headache for the transformative work clause of copyright for years to come. Also policing training would be completely unenforcable so any decision here would be rather moot either way.
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 3 months ago
That’s where laws would come in. Obviously it would have civil law, not criminal law, but making sure it would be enforceable would have to be part of such laws. For example, forcing model makers to disclose their training dataset in one way or another.
jadelord@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
We are free to learn, but learning is not free.
Freedom vs cost. One cannot pickup a skill without time, effort and more importantly access to guidance and a vast library of content. Same applies to man or machine. The difference is how corporations have essentially reinvented piracy to facilitate their selfish ends after decades of dictating what’s right with DMCA, DRM and what not.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 3 months ago
But…it’s already been enforced, several times.
Willy@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
I think you’re allowed to listen to every song on the open internet too.
mrfriki@lemmy.world 3 months ago
But not making business out of them.
PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
One has to pay a very high cost to do this. These AI companies did not pay. Why do AI companies get a pass on copyrighted material that the rest of us are getting sued, imprisoned, and fined for accessing?
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 3 months ago
But I’m not allowed to remix them. That’s the point that’s being made