“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
If copyright had a reasonable duration, a huge chunk of that would have been public domain and not an issue.
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)
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.
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:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0
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.
If I as a human listened to every single song of a band from start to finish, then produced a similar song in the same vein (lyrics / music genre), it would be fair use.
So why would it stop being fair use if an AI does the same thing? Just that the AI can listen to every song of this band and a million other bands, combining them.
Because fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement. To use a fair use defense you have to admit your work is infringing, but argue that the infringement is justifiable.
Trying to defend the AI with fair use requires you to admit the AI itself is infringing, but justifiable, and by the doctrine of fair use, it is almost certainly not.
Only humans can hold copyrights. Your example would be a non-infringing work because it lacks direct copying. An AI doing the same would make an uncopyrightable work, with the AI itself being infinging if you tried the fair use defense.
Only humans can hold copyrights.
Yeah, no. Most copyrighted material is owned by companies, you don’t have to be a natural person to hold copyrights. And if a company can hold copyrights, you can also argue it can have fair use.
Companies are run by people. The human employees create copyrighted works that become the property of their employer by the terms of their contract. That’s how work for hire contracts work…
You would know this if you have ever worked in any creative field.
I work in a creative field. But companies are companies. If I work for a company and create something, it doesn’t belong to a natural person, it immediately goes over to the company.
Not the CEO or CTO or whoever is in management, it belongs to the legal entity. Isn’t this a company owning the work I just created? If the CEO dies, the company still owns it.
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.
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.
I prefer ‘I Stink’.
Link please? For research purposes, of course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPlOYPGMRws&list=OLAK5uy_n2EyGSzgPcGJtF3-inSboC-aU3Nm8jKGE
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.
https://youtu.be/wPlOYPGMRws?si=Xu094G4Ta5HfeLKS
YouTube link
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.
Just tried it out out of curiosity. It does a good job, but the music is still boring.
They’re not recreating music or selling albums. Someone called the musicians victims lol
Insane stuff
Great AI gets more rights than us too!
I think you’re allowed to listen to every song on the open internet too.
But not making business out of them.
You can make a business as soon as you’re done listening to them all.
If you get an idea from a song, you are 1000% free to turn that into new art. This is the fair use argument.
I agree with the logic, but I don’t think it should apply to LLMs—a humans-only law, if you will.
That’s sort of currently the law with copyright in the US. You can’t get a copyright on material made completely by an AI. Only if a human interfered can you get a copyright, and most likely only on the parts that the human interfered with.
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.”
I think the key is that an LLM can’t have ideas. Its creative endeavors aren’t creative. Art is about the craft and the message and an LLM lacks that context. Like. The best an LLM can do is produce the kinds of music Drake does that is meant to pacify people into continuous consumption
I had a similar thought after I wrote this. LLMs aren’t creating anything so much as style-copying. They’re unique productions, insomuch as rearranging notes or pixels makes something unique, but I think creativity requires conscious agency, which LLMs definitely do not have.
Also, I don’t need to copy the entirety of Drake’s discography to produce music like his, which is an aspect of human creativity that LLMs currently lack.
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?
Lot of people flying in this thread to down vote people saying that these media companies live by a different set of rules than the rest of us without understanding that this AI model is basically a huge automated record scratching DJ that can only regurgitate things its heard before reassembled and presented as new. If any of us tried to do this same thing they’d sue our pants off for piracy and plagiarism. But when they do it it’s fine.
plagiarism isn’t a tort.
But I’m not allowed to remix them. That’s the point that’s being made
It can’t remix either so that’s not an issue
That’s the only thing it does.
woosh
no, it doesn’t.
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 in real world practice either way.
Also policing training would be completely unenforcable
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.
But you can already train models at home also you can just extend existing models with new training data. Will that be regulated too? How?
They‘re literally already about to heavily regulate hobby AI to ensure giant corporations that hoard all our information get to make even more mountains of money with it. The idea that anyone gets to use any media for machine learning is already a relict of the past and in fact not remotely comparable to learning things for yourself. Especially not in the legal sense. Did you really naively believe AI will democratize anything for even a second?
deleted by creator
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.
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 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?
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
i’m principled, so i know that copying content is good and stopping people from copying is bad.
you’re wrong on the facts, this has nothing to do with supporting corporations.
Sure, jan
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.
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.
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
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.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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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”.
now all new music will be based on heyyeyaaeyaaaeyaeyaa
It’s pretty obvious if you get specific with the tags. Especially with older styles where there’s less available trianing data.
why are comments full of AI shilling? are these bot accounts or are there still real people actually defending “AI” ““art””?
deleted by creator
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?
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
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.
You’ve convinced me, your comment is objectively bad art.
Why are comments RIAA shilling?
Are you a bot?
The fuck is wrong with discourse now. This kind of comment is just embarrassing.
Yeah, imagine different people having different opinions than you!
Can’t be, must be russians.
If it helps dividing the societies of Russia’s enemies, then probably it is.
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.
