“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
Even the one where I moist-farted the riff from “7 Nation Army” and looped it for 24 hours, i.e. 7-nation-army-beans-and-dairy-mix.aiff?
Just ask for it to make you a song in the “Beans and Dairy” genre
You already named it aiff (Artificial Intelligence Fart File)
I would like to hear this if it’s real.
They said “All the music files”, not unholy abomination from the seventh layer of ass hell.
Ass of the beholder etc.?
If you post stuff online for people to view it, don’t be surprised when computers see it too.
Copyright doesn’t work like that.
The fact that you put online (e.g. in an online shop or, heck, even for free on your website) doesn’t imply anyone can use it for anything they please.
For example an mp3 on a indie musician website for making people know their music, doesn’t mean people can start making CD out of it and selling them
You may say that piracy exists but it is illegal and AI training is pretty much for profit piracy (using something outside the intended scope defined by the author for profit)
Sure, this company will burn for this, but Pandora’s box is wide open now.
I’m not condoning anything, but the original comment is unfortunately 100% true.
I think that the argument is that it’s not actually copying it and instead learning from it.
I feel like they really have to pay something. Maybe their argument is right and they shouldn’t pay full price given that if a human did the same thing to learn to make music, they also wouldn’t be billed in that way, given it’s openly available.
Maybe they are required to give a portion of profits back to the source materials creators?
The purpose of the copyright system is that someone should not be allowed to take your material and sell it to someone else passing it off as your own and make the profit thereby stealing the profit from you. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here but also at the same time it doesn’t seem like what they’re doing is right because they’re making profit off of somebody else’s work without paying anything.
It feels to me like the answer should be somewhere in the middle.
I certainly don’t have the answers though.
the argument is that it’s not actually copying it and instead learning from it.
It’s not learning, though.
Saying that these models have learnt the data they’ve been built with is akin to saying a zip file has learned the data it’s storing.
It’s not AI or anything remotely resembling AI, it’s just a new form of storage that’s very good at classifying the data that’s been stored in it and retrieving stored data that shares similar classification properties.
Its only difference from straight up copying are the classifications it builds. Whether that’s transformative enough to count as fair use, though, is open to debate.
If you make a software that takes random pictures off the web and randomly makes collages out of them, would it be fair use? Would those collages be copyrightable?
Whatever you answer should be your same answer for these models (I believe current copyright law would say that the software is copyrightable, but its works aren’t, and don’t fall under fair use, but I might be wrong).
A collage would be fair use, yes I believe that’s already been established but again I’m not like a copyright lawyer or anything like that. I’ll leave that for others to research and prove in the courtroom.
I would say that your first example, as it file is not really accurate but the collage may be more so. It’s a statistical model that calculates statistically what a thing should be. Is it learning? Maybe maybe not.
Yea, it’s the victim’s fault!
UMG can go to hell. Musicians already make almost next to nothing from song sales because the labels take so much.
Yeah but the fucking labels aren’t even being that resistant to AI. AI is robbing the labels a little, and the artists a lot. It’s like how in 1984 george orwell points out the proletariat and the middle class should be allies, but the middle class always installs itself as the upper class and leaves the proletariat behind. The labels are willing to ditch the artists so long as they get to stay in one of the upper two classes. So they’re willing to sell access to their back catalog and their lost masters to the AI companies so long as that pays them a little bit better than paying out for new artists to join the label. They’re the fucking overseers or the small whites in Haiti. They hurt the people they should be working with because they’re too short sighted to see what’s gonna happen once everything shakes out. And you’re over here rooting the AI robbery on because it will hurt the labels instead of realizing who it’s REALLY gonna hurt
SVU over here
Posting doesn’t mean anyone can exploit it for commercial gain. Also a lot of music is pirated against the Creator’s wishes.
Abolish copyright.
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.
Oh my desire to abolish hierarchical society is… Pretty core to who I am lol. So there was some bias in that. Yeah there’s ways to make get rid of copyright, still have professions, and still have a hierarchy, but at a certain point you’re building a gentler form of capitalism instead of treating people with the true respect and dignity they deserve. I’m willing to accept I’m pretty radical on this particular set of views.
Also yes. Everyone should get UBI and the billionaires pockets should be where we get the money from
I guess my point is that retaining copyright isn’t necessarily dependent on abolishing hierarchies altogether. People imagine it would take a complete re-imagining of our economy to abolish copyright (and it isn’t a small thing, to be sure), but it’s honestly less intensive than most people think.
Especially since most of the economic value of copyright is held by large corporations, not private individuals.
rules protecting creative endeavors
that’s not what copyright does.
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.
Are you taking about patents? Cause a world without copyright doesn’t sound very fun to me. Or anyone in a remotely creative job.
Ever for patents: There’s a reason innovations are protected literally anywhere in the world, but the durations being ever longer is a real problem (5 years would probably be fine). The basic concept is still just straight up necessary.
No, i’m talking about all intellectual works (copyrights and patents being some of the categories commonly used)
Humans need no incentive to create new works, but the way we distribute resources requires us to make these rules so that those creators fit within our ‘work for food’ production model.
Even a modest UBI would support most creative endeavors, but instead of that we have a “monetize your work or starve” arrangement.
I agree that the current state of laws is overkill by about an order of magnitude, and that’s obviously bad.
But you do need some amount of protection for works created. Imagine being a photographer, you can’t make money. You make some nice photos, and how do you sell them? If you send a sample to someone, they can just print that and you can do nothing. There’s no copyright after all. It isn’t somthing you can protect legally, so you can’t stop them or sue them for compensation. There’s also a flip side from the corporate perspective: You might find employment as a full time photographer in places that need them, but what about all the companies that just need an occasional picture? You can’t contract it out, because you have no way to negotiate anything if their work isn’t protected, you can’t even look at samples cause nobody would ever dare showing any or they might just be used.
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 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.
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.
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 as its bricks and mortar. 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 unethical and needs regulation from that perspective.
Taking other people’s creative works to create your own for-profit product is illegal in every way except when AI does it.
wrong.
You’re literally on a piracy server. You know about the laws and how hard the corpos crack down on us. Why the fuck are you licking the boots now
you’re wrong on the facts, this has nothing to do with supporting corporations.
Sure, jan
i’m principled, so i know that copying content is good and stopping people from copying is bad.
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.
No, actually its completely legal to consume content that was uploaded to the internet and then use it as inspiration to create your own works.
Algorithms don’t have “inspiration”.
What is “inspiration” in your opinion and how would that differ from machine learning algorithms?
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 isn’t 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.
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.
“4 chords” is a cool mashup but it’s not really a valid point in this conversation.
The songs in “4 chords” don’t use the same 4 chords, because they are higher and lower than that. So you might say they use the same progression, but that’s not true either, because they’re not always constantly in the same order. So the best you can say is “it’s possible to interpret pitch- and tempo-adjusted excerpts of these songs back-to-back”, which isn’t a very strong claim.
In fact there’s a lot of things separating the songs in “4 chords”; such as structure, arrangement, rhythm, lyrics, or production. Another fact is that it’s perfectly possible to use these four chords in a way that you’ve never heard before and would likely find bizarre – it’s a bit of meme, but limitation really can breed creativity.
This isn’t to defend the lack of creativity in the big music industry. But there’s more to it than just saying “4 chords” to imply all musicians do is follow an established grid.
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.
I think the solution is just that anything AI generated should be public domain.
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.Well, the AI doesn’t do all the work, you use public domain material (AI output) to create your own copyright protected product/art/thing etc.
All you have to do is put some human work into the creation. I guess the value of the result still correlates with the amount of human work one puts into a project.
If you roll a set of dice, do you own the number?
I don’t think it is a tool in the same sense that image editing software is.
But if for example you use a LLM to write an outline for something and you heavily edit it, then that’s transformative, and it’s owned by you.
The raw output isn’t yours, even though the prompt and final edited version are.
If you snap a photo of something, you own the photo (at least in the US).
There’s a solid argument that someone doing complex AI image generation has done way more to create the final product than someone snapping a quick pic with their phone.
One could also say that building a camera from first principles is a lot more work than entering a prompt in DALL-E, but using false equivalents isn’t going up get us very far.
I think a fairer comparison in that case would be the difficulty of building a camera vs the difficulty of building and programming an AI capable computer.
That doesn’t really make sense either way though, no one is building their camera/computer from raw materials and then arguing that gives them better intellectual rights.
That’s the current status quo.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. You’re absolutely correct (at least, in the US). And it seems to be based on pretty solid reasoning, so I could see a lot of other copyright offices following the same idea.
Source: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf (See header II. The Human Authorship Requirement)
TL;DR
the Office states that “to qualify as a work of ‘authorship’ a work must be created by a human being” and that it “will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.”
Yes. Uncopyrightable = public domain. Copyright is not the default
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: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/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: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/03/agatha-christie-alzheimers-research
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: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech/
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
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.
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
It’s pretty obvious if you get specific with the tags. Especially with older styles where there’s less available trianing data.
they’re right, they should absolutely be allowed to use and profit off of other peoples work that they spent decades learning and perfecting
(this is sarcasm in case you can’t tell they’re dumb as fuck for saying that shut this company down today pls)
Just tried it out out of curiosity. It does a good job, but the music is still boring.
why are comments full of AI shilling? are these bot accounts or are there still real people actually defending “AI” ““art””?
Why are comments RIAA shilling?
Are you a bot?
The fuck is wrong with discourse now. This kind of comment is just embarrassing.
A big % of social media comments are bots, more than you can imagine. You probably have had multiple arguments with Chat-GPT without knowing.
Not as many as I’ve had with knowing. Piece of shit never works right.
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.
Anyone can do anything, but becoming proficient at something is hard and takes time. Why do you hate people who create art so much?
because they dont and we have to accept that. may they enjoy their lives and so may their fans and followers. is a melody made by a bird a lower level of creativity than a melody made by you?
is a melody made by a bird a lower level of creativity than a melody made by you?
Probably so. Bird melodies serve a biological purpose to the bird, as a form of communication. The bird doesn’t intend to make music, us humans just interpret it that way
thats what i ment. you overvalue the human creations. you think animals are not sentinent,right?
you think animals are not sentinent,right?
No, absolutely not. Animals are without a doubt sentient. Unless they are a sea sponge or something.
music is not art. not all. not even close. it is entertainment at best.
I feel like you and the 4 people who upvoted your comment have commodified music too much. It’s easy to do these days with all the streaming services and such that exist to commodify it. But music isn’t always purely entertainment, It’s something created for a purpose by real people.
I’d say everything is art, just on different levels to different people. Or nothing is art.
no. i do not think so. taking a dump isnt art, creating the mona lisa is art. what we enjoy and think is “art” as in something an ai or a bird can create is not art.and so isnt taylor swift, nktob or whatever is “popular”. it just means many ppl can vibe with it. like bacon and onions.
I’d say that open for discussion. Even taking a dump can be seen from the perspective of art, although I agree for us humans it’s quite far out there.
Perhaps to smallen the gap, think of a dung beetle rolling a ball of poo.
I’m not saying you have to like it or even that it’s noteworthy, but art in my opinion as definition can be anything that is created by something. As long as an observer looks at it as if it were art.
so art made by an AI is art to you?
Yes, in the same way a field of corn on a farm can be seen as art. We do not have full control over how it actually looks in the end, but it’s an expression by natural phenomena (sometimes guided or initiated by humans).
You could argue about the amount of free will required to create art. But in that case one could philosophically raise the question if humans even have free will, and if anything may be called art then at all.
I think if something is observed as art, it is by definition art. And perhaps everything that exists and is created could fit that description. But personally one of the more interesting types of art to me are where living beings are involved in the creation, while they’re actually thinking of creating art; and I think most discussions are about that concrete level.
hm. but an ai could create an infinite amount. and each item might be perceived as art by some individual. and you say it has the same value as the mona lisa? i doubt that. an ai could even replicate billions of near similar mona lisas. yet none of them is art even if there is an individual that perceives the ai image as art. the only that is taking place is narcism.
There’s objectively good and objectively bad art. Anyone who says otherwise is just an edgelord who is not on top of the conversation.
You’re quite a dichtomous thinker. Ever try wisdom instead of logic
You’ve convinced me, your comment is objectively bad art.
I wish lemmy had the ability to save comments to folders, like email. This could go in the “Wild Takes” folder. Seriously, what metric would you use to objectively measure all art? Even a survey of people is going to be biased based on who you sample and its still a subjective opinion of people
You know art / art history is a subject of study at the majority of universities? Art is simply not a free-for-all concept where everything produced is equal, that is only what bad artists want to believe.
Good art is relevant, bad art is irrelevant. That’s the base where people who know about it judge it.
You know art / art history is a subject of study at the majority of universities?
Yep, and I think that’s great! Learning to make and appreciate art should be something everyone has a chance to do. Those programs at universities are great for learning principles of art. They teach you the “rules”. However, once you leave that class, you don’t have to follow any of those rules if you don’t want to. Learning the rules is great because then you know where you can break them.
I like a lot of music that most people would despise. I am very glad that there are artists that are willing to make such music, even though the masses will not appreciate it.
example: https://carlstone.bandcamp.com/track/sumiya
Art is simply not a free-for-all concept where everything produced is equal, that is only what bad artists want to believe.
I do feel that art is indeed a free-for-all. Anyone can create it, anyone can view it. Art means different things to different people and therefore it’s not productive to put certain art above other pieces of art. Even if 1000 people think a painting is horrible looking, if 1 person enjoys it, it was still worth creating that piece
Good art is relevant, bad art is irrelevant.
There is tons of good art that is “irrelevant”. Ever taken a stroll through Bandcamp? There is so much music there that maybe only 100 people have listened to, even if its gorgeous sounding. Relevance doesn’t have anything to do with quality.
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.
Can’t be, must be russians.
If it helps dividing the societies of Russia’s enemies, then probably it is.
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 predict “AI” will get better and start generating things that are indiscernible from real art and music in the future. However, that doesn’t mean it will replace artists. Because while AI generated stuff is kinda neat… there isn’t any spirit behind it. With real music and art, people are creating it because they enjoy doing it and every step of the process they have control over. With AI art its just a computer pumping out garbage, even if it is engineered to sound or look good. I don’t know if I’m doing a good job explaining what I mean lol
From a broad technical perspective “human” “art” is also a process of observing, learning, and recombining to make something new out of it. There is also experimentation which can be incorporated into AI models as well, see for example reinforcement learning, where exploration is an important concept. Therefore, I don’t see how that’s different from “AI” “art”.
However, that should not defend how morally questionable training data is sourced.
i don’t care about the training data as much as the insane lengths people go to humanize AI. it’s not observing, and it’s not learning. it doesn’t even know what it’s copying, what anything means, and what it’s even doing. and most importantly it’s not communicating anything. because there’s nothing to communicate. it’s not art.
also i don’t get your point of using scare quotes around “human”… are you suggesting we’re not human? wtf is that even supposed to mean?
Lmao, fair use… Fuck off with that in this case
Its fair use when they take your labour, it is gulag when you play their song.
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[Edit] Inspired actually changes everything. Inspired is all you. But if you’re using actual parts or pieces of somebody else’s work, then they should be compensated.
I like suno because its fun to think of dumb shit to make a song over
i had it make me a few gangsta raps about the solar system. it was fun
Here are my favorite experiments (I wrote the lyrics) :
https://suno.com/song/a71c88ce-4a7a-4e6e-b0f1-8125c6be871b
https://suno.com/song/7faf3ab5-04da-44ce-903a-1d05eb86a8ef
Just wanted to say I like your burrito song. Very creative and funny. And the harmless country music is the cherry on top.
Lol thank you
Same, I made a rap about you can’t trust a fart and was surprised that how decent it turned out.
Is there a place you share them? That sounds hilarious.
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 by the record labels right now for this. We will see how much they have to pay if they lose
I don’t know if corpos will allow such dangerous precedent since all mega corps are guilty of this
Fantastic! I love music and am currently training an AI of myself to determine whether or not I would like certain music, movies, tv shows, video games, business ideas, technolory, porn and art. In order to train my personal AI properly I need a copy of everything every human being and corporation has ever created so I can personally assess it.
This is great news for everyone!
Wait, not like that…
