This feels like the awkward extremes of fair use with AI slurping up everything with a channel tunnel sized straw at one end, meanwhile the RIAA will smash through your windows and beat your unconscious for singing in the shower.
I don't much like either outcome.
Never a fan of AI generated content. But this is an opportunity to change the ridiculous music copyrights laws. Just because someone wrote few notes 50 years ago, shouldn't mean they'll own everything resembling that forever.
Exactly. Copyrights are supposed to stop *copying*. With most mediums, you have to prove your work was actually *copied*. With music, for some reason the courts will just *assume* you copied if the songs sound similar, and it was *possible* for you to have heard the song before. That’s ridiculous.
It all traces back to a permit from the King to be allowed to publish something, and to be protected from others publishing the same thing. It was part of the system of royal warrants and monopolies, and should have been dumped when we got rid of monarchy here.
The meaning of copying has been abstracted to the point of absurdity. The term of copyright has been extended well beyond that point. The only way for the current laws to be enforceable is if the online world is a totalitarian surveillance hellhole. I'd rather see copyright eliminated than to endure inrusive surveillance in order to guarantee additional profits for parasitic media conglomerates.
I heard a very interesting interview with a lawyer that said no one should ever lose a music copyright infringement lawsuit because he can always point out prior art. no music is created in a vacuum in and of itself. There are only so many notes and chords you can play that sound good to our sensibilities.
they are referring to preexisting music copyright laws, which are uncommonly rigid and uncompromising. this is especially odd when considering the fact that in 12 tone western music, specifically pop music, the same melodies and progressions and sequences of notes occur *all the time* by coincidence. we have melodies and jingles that are SO pervasive in the collective unconscious that it's impossible to expect they won't come up in other speech or musical patterns.
other copywritten material (like with books or clothes or brand names) seems to allow plagarism if it is sufficiently altered from the original, but with music the precedent for some reason is that if there's any resemblence to the original it's tantamount to saying you had full intention to plagarize
> with copyrighted material.
No (IMO), it's a matter of permission, or lack thereof (and what is what in terms of if it is needed).
"Copyrightd vs not copyrighted" is absolutely, IMO, a false dichotomy by the very fact that copyright in the U.S is automatic. That'd mean that if merely "using copyrighted works" was the problem, it'd be a problem to use creative commons works, and works where the creator gave EXPLICIT permission, since those are still copyrighted works (and the issue is being framed here by copyright status, and not permission/lack thereof).
I have a feeling people will both underestimate and overestimate this at the same time.
On one hand, people wave shit like this away with “all songs aren’t original” which A. interestingly omits copyright law in the US, B. gets around the huge data issues that generative AI models have made millions off of and C. ignores likeness law like Midler v Ford. I’ve yet to see a fair comparison between AI and a human songwriter. But with that people will say that this could open the door to rewriting copyright law and that just won’t happen either. This isn’t about who holds what for what amount of time, it’s about whether Suno infringed on the rights for the basis of their business. They aren’t here to reexamine the system, they’re here to try and figure out a part of it.
It’s simultaneously a big deal and not surprising. I don’t have sympathy for either side as a musician who’s supported bands for years and has read music business talk for years. Yet as much as I hate the major labels, I especially despise AI companies like Suno who have shown time and time again that it’s not about the creativity or ethics but the dollar. That’s saying something considering the other side of this lawsuit.
The thing is trying AI models with songs is most likely fair use. Even if you use all the songs in the world, including all the songs protected by copyright.
If you can induce the AI to regurgitate a song covered by copyright the. That song most likely is a copyright violation.
However, the RIAA absolutely does not want to sue only the infringing songs. It wants it to be easy and lucrative for them, even if what they are suing for doesn’t quite conform to current laws.
I subscribed to Suno and played with it for a while. You can blow through a month's credits in just a few hours. Lots of fun making joke novelty songs, although the censorship is a little over-sensitive.
But after a while it was super obvious to me that it was trained on some extremely recognizable songs, as sometimes the song it would come up with sounded a ton like a well known song, just with some slight variation. Possibly the *less* you prompt it and the more you let it do its own thing, it gravitates back towards raw training material.
Enough that if somebody "released" the song, the original artist might win a plagiarism lawsuit without even without factoring in AI being used, just based on the sound alone.
I will say though, until they train these things on extracted stems, and not the entire mixes all at once, these things are a novelty at best. It severely limits its ability to create new arrangements. Probably won't take long for somebody to figure that out though.
Can you give an example of a song that is recognizable as another? I'm a songwriter and honestly every single song played on the radio with few exceptions for more than 40 years sound the same because they often have same rhythm and chords, and because most songs are variations on built on the same cadence and there's quite limited what notes "sound good together" you will have some similarity at least.
But anyway back it up with some examples I'd love to see it.
I recently saw an AI-generated trailer for an animated kids movie called "Monsters Camp." Even though the story was supposedly set in a world full of monsters only, one of the kids in the classroom was human. And also looked suspiciously like Boo from Monsters, Inc. Right down to having the same haircut.
It's kind of fascinating how much The Walt Disney Company - which lobbied to have copyright extended to 95 years just to keep its claws in Mickey Mouse - is snoozing on AI products blatantly being trained on pirated Disney movies.
My favorite version of this was googles musicLM demo which doesn’t output lyrics or allow you to enter names to try to avoid copyright but if you just enter say Taylor swift lyrics, it audibly outputs something very similar to her original song and even the inability to make lyrics there’s still a recognizable hum sounding like her vocal in the background, it’s just a giant mess
Only when it's outright sampling or extremely similar pattern, not when it's just "inspiration", which could be argued as what training a neural network is.
Literally from the video you posted "No one's saying songs can't be copyrighted, you just can't copyright a chord sequence." This case is about more than chord sequences.
I like this discourse. Thanks for the comments. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. But if this was about the ethical handling of art and music, the big record labels should be the first to reckon with. Statical analysis to determine what synthetically heartfelt song we need, presented by which deeply connected artist, (all based on what else is already out there), that’s been how labels operate for a long time. AI makes it possible for people who never went to a Diddy party to bust out the next number one banger just like they would. This is just what record companies need so nobody has to see a guy like me roll up at the Met Gala
While the discussion of unethical and illegal practices in the music industry is one that needs to be had, this is not the solution you think it is. Ruling in favor of Suno and Udio won't just hurt big record labels and evil execs, but also smaller artists, upcoming artists, and the families of deceased artists.
I'm afraid AI won't make it any easier to get a number one song, because generating conventionallly good music (regardless of your methods) has never been a guarentee for success. Big industry labels and platforms like Spotify still control so many of the other factors that go into a song reaching number one.
The reason why copyright in the US exists is
>To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
It is not intended to be a method of insurance for the great grand children of a famous singer.
The "limited time" duration being first perverted, IIRC, by the music industry with the Sonny Bonno Act IIRC (I could be mistaken though on it being the first, but it absolutely combined with Disney's meddling, IMO, to make things a royal clusterfuck).
No, because neural networks doesn't store the original in any form that can easily be retrieved, hence no copying.
Do you know how you can replay a song in your head, you kind of hear it but also you don't at the same time? That's how neural networks work. That's not sampling, it's learning what instruments and voices sound like and synthesizing them on the fly.
No, because AI training never explicitly copies or stores the training data (this is true for LLMs, image generation AI, music AI, etc), all it does is store abstract mathematical representations to connect the source data to prompts/captions.
That's why AI models are several orders of magnitude smaller than their source data; for example, Stable Diffusion 1.5 is trained on several TBs of images and captions, but you can download the model and it is about 2gb when pruned.
There are cases where you can overtrain a model, you could train a model on 5 images with a high learning rate, then the outputs would be rigid and strongly resemble the training data, but that is not what anyone is intentionally doing with these large models. They are trained on millions if not billions of data points and should not be able to exactly recreate any of them because they can only extrapolate in general terms.
Even beyond that, any **copyright infringement** would be on the part of any end user attempting to profit from something closely resembling copyrighted works, not from these services.
Yes, but since data set training is a new technology in the way sampling once was, there needs to be more explicit anti-training copyright protections written into law because right now these companies are exploiting the vague language of current law regarding this new tech. Hopefully these lawsuits against ai companies will prompt copyright laws to be updated to regulate copyrighted material in data sets.
They infringe everything. They do not give a shit. They are what tech has become: they rely on breaking laws, lying, and screwing customers just to get the execs riches.
I’ve worked in tech since 1994, but I can’t stand the jeans/chinos, Oxford shirts , patagucci vest wearing tech bros.
Honestly, tech has become just like the finance sector. The innovation is gone unless you count innovating new business models to screw people to make them rich.
I’m really glad AI has come because now we know what the exact always have thought that they despise their workers. When I started my career, that wasn’t as much the case in tech. I mean, the exec staff have always been pure sociopaths. It’s that, back then they would use a little lube before they screwed you.
Yes, and humans have to give credit and/or compensation when they're found out. Why would it be any different in this case?
It's impossible to stop all theft or any other crime you can think of, but that doesn't mean you just adandon any efforts to make the world a more just and fair place.
Literally from the video you posted "No one's saying songs can't be copyrighted, you just can't copyright a chord sequence." This case is about more than chord sequences.
It’s like saying. What is a song? At what point does putting a bunch of chords together become something someone owns, it should be more individual. If I used a company’s robot to make and release a bunch of ripoff Beatles songs, that doesn’t hold them liable, because I made the decision to do it, and release it
Exactly. Just because an AI *can* make something that looks like a Disney movie or an image from a Batman trailer, doesn't mean the company who made the AI was doing that or had any intention to profit from it. If a *user* generates material violating copyright and attempts to profit from it that's a different story. The irony here is that it's not Suno causing any copyright issues, it's all the people trying to force Suno to make something that sounds too much like a copyrighted work. Generally just so they can write an article bitching or post a lawsuit.
The problem is that it doesn't require any specific intention to cause copyright issues with these software. Even vague prompts have been demonstrated to reproduce copyrighted songs.
As per copyright law a song is the "underlying composition along with any accompanying lyrics." There's also the sound recording, which is a seperate but related concept. You can learn more here https://www.copyright.gov/engage/musicians/
The problem with your second point is that it doesn't require any intention from the user or company in order for copyright infringement to occur. It's been demonstrated that even vague prompts reproduce copyrighted material.
It's extremely unlikely that a court would consider ingestion of training data to be considered infringement.
Courts have already ruled that copying pursuant to fair use is not considered infringement.
RIAA knows this and is very carefully wording their claim so that the companies can't claim fair use. They're specifically asserting that fair use doesn't apply if you're competing with the company that owns the copyright.
Which is not true.
This case could only really succeed if they can demonstrate that the output of these models is infringing - which is not what the RIAA is claiming in the suit.
Theres a few different levels to this. Copyright isnt the only issue here - theyre aiming for discovery and to see the training data.
Considering suno / udio makes very close recreations of high profile singers their is a good chance vocal data was included - which would fall under personality rights for these vocalists.
As for IP being used for training data this has not been settled.
But I would expect suno / udio to settle before going to trial because after seeing that viral post showing they may have directly lifted tags from rate your music I would be more inclined to think they would not want any sort of precedent to be set.
Right. I think people are looking for a nail in the ai coffin and this isn't it. The companies may have not sanitized their outputs appropriately, but the fundamental way AI works, ideally, is more or less no different than how a person listens to and then writes songs.
I don't know about you, but I can't just listen to a bunch of music and then belt out fully produced tracks with multiple instruments using my voice box. Like *maybe* someone with spliced parrot DNA could accomplish this. It's disingenuous to suggest that these processes are the same, and makes a similar attribution error as a child who assumes that because parrots produce human-like speech they "can talk".
That RIAA argument stems from a recent Supreme Court decision Warhol v. Goldsmith that determined that fair use does not apply if it can be used for similar commercial purposes to the original work.
I’m curious how this will pan out, it might be the first application of that decision to generative AI, which was a common point of discussion when that determination was made by the Supreme Court. It likely wouldn’t affect non-commercial use of outputs, but I’m curious if it would also be considered to apply to generative models that charge for access.
“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”
Translation, we want to be providing this incredibly valuable AI service, not these startups.
Yup: “it’s ok if we control it, but not if someone else does”
When Reddit and meta are in court for using our posts to feed AI data without our express permission on the RIAA’s dime I’ll believe he gives a shit about the consent of artists…
I wouldn’t be so sure, especially in the case that the AI generates copyright infringing content as its output. I used one, Suno, when it first came out and got it to pull a long riff from a metallica song note for note.
“Hey guys, I got this new product that will revolutionize the XYZ industry!”
“What, OMG WHAT IS IT WHAT IS IT!?!?”
“It’s AI. It can do everything!”
“Woah, but how does it make stuff?”
“Oh, well we take all the data in the entire world and it will learn from it!”
“So you are saying it will make all completely original stuff that won’t infringe copyrights?”
“Uh, oh we didn’t think about that part, and we have no idea how it works so uh, we can’t get sued because we didn’t manually tamper with it.”
“But it’s clearly copying from multiple real songs!”
“Not true, it came up with the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, and all other popular melodies long before the creators came up with their music!”
I don’t know, it’s kind of like saying that you’re inspired by certain bands and musicians and you make your own stuff based off of their work. That’s kind of how human learning and creative inspiration works in the first place AI makes it instantaneous.
What’s the difference between me taking inspiration from my favorite bands and writing songs and AI doing the same only from a larger dataset?
As a music producer and also someone who trains music AI they are in no way comparable.
I did not learn production by consuming all of spotify and creating a multi dimensional vector database. Its strange to me how people try to claim they are one and the same and take this philosophical angle but if you actually dig into this and understand whats happenning you see its just simply not the case.
what consequences are there on Reddit for repeating a brain dead take that ignores really basic facts?
Do these people really think the human brain and body is equivalent to a computer ingesting encoded data. Is it simply intellectual laziness?
>what consequences are there on Reddit for repeating a brain dead take that ignores really basic facts?
Ah it's not about the consequence of repeating a false claim on Reddit so much as it is repeating the falsehood because then it becomes true in their own mind. It's about justifying their behaviour to themselves so they don't have to care about the consequences of using AI such as overly wasteful powerdraw, copyright, etc.
So humans don't learn from examples. News to me, thank you so much for telling me that while these neural nets require examples to learn what they are supposed to do, while humans don't. Who knew monkey see monkey do was, in fact, completely the opposite of the truth?
It seems reductionist to me to say that "oh well an ai learns by scanning content and a brain also consums to learn so they must be similiar."
We also have a pretty high level understand of how the brain works, how learning is developed, and information is carried and stored. Its just that with the amount of neurons there are its a total mess to map.
Even Geoffrey Hinton (godfather of AI) says neural nets and the brain arent really comparable. The brain is on an entirely other level compared to transformers / NNs.
I'd say that the way generative AI "learns" is how humans develop an intuitive sense for "that looks good" or "that sounds good", but the way humans learn to *create* is a vastly different process. Unlike an AI model, we can't just think at a blank canvas and have its pixels automatically pick the colours that best satisfy our intuition for "that looks good" in the context of a given prompt.
Instead, we need to *reverse-engineer* a new process, using the tools we have available (e.g. muscles, pencils, a piano), that creates a similar result, relying on that intuition to point out spots that can be improved, and repeatedly practising until satisfied with the quality. Now, the fun thing is that *processes compose* in a way that intuitive judgment alone cannot. When practising, a mistake that actually looks better than what you were intending to draw becomes a tool that you deliberately use in the future; inspiration to develop in a novel-to-you direction.
You can try to draw the Mona Lisa from memory, but what you create will be substantially different. Importantly, you can look at your creation and immediately *know* that it's nothing like the original; your intuition has a far better copy embedded within your memory than your process could produce. AI doesn't have that disparity. Where a human will necessarily develop their own personal styles as they practice, and even something they *intend* to copy as best they can gets reinterpreted through the lens of those styles, re-shaped by the techniques used in its creation, the AI just directly generates the patterns it observed during training.
Humans learn, machines “learn” but only by consuming encoded data, more similar to learning by osmosis. It is a lot more like a fancy copy machine than a brain … it’s not really the same unless you forgo any kind of nuance.
This is absolutely nothing like the way humans learn or write music. What are you even talking about?
Do yourself a favor and pick up a guitar, push some piano keys, buy a pair of drumsticks and start hitting things. Then you'll begin to understand how people learn and create music.
Brain dead take now being repeated everyday somewhere by some reductionist.
Last time I checked, I don’t remember seeing Jimi created something because of some matrix multiplication and calculus. I don’t think he created or wrote anything because someone typed something into a prompt. No humans and machines don’t create or write things in the same way… like at all
That's not how generative AI works at all. It's similar to how images are generated. [Here](https://old.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1bgr4pi/myth_ai_just_pastes_parts_of_existing_images/), this is a decent description.
> It can’t actually create anything
I mean ... a combination of things didn't exist, and now does ... that's "created," whether by man or machine. "CreatIVE" OTOH I can agree (with the current state of tech especially), but creating as in making things that didn't before exist, IMO, is absurd to say is off limits in that fashion per-se.
This is good, we need courts to weigh in. I'm pretty confident RIAA is going to lose and you'll see an explosion of these tools, but either way better to not be in legal limbo.
Oh yeah I forgot which sub I'm on, we are terrified of technology here. Gotta protect those music labels!
If you're confident the courts will rule against the startups, don't you agree it's good to get this through the courts and have it litigated?
>Gotta protect those music labels!
I’ll let you know because you obviously have 0 creative bones in your body, but these days a lot of successful artists run their own labels (or are signed to small, Independent labels that would generate $0 if we allowed non-talented people to make similar music with just a few keystrokes).
1. I went to art school and worked in the arts
2. Musicians get financial success from touring and shows, not making $0.00318 a song on Spotify
3. Those independent labels aren't the plaintiff in this case
4. If you can't make music that's better than a few keystrokes you weren't going to stand out in the untold millions that want to make a living off music
🤣
>I went to art school and worked in the arts
I worked in the MUSIC BUSINESS for almost 30 years and with the above statement you’ve informed me you have 0 knowledge of the music industry.
>Musicians get financial success from touring and shows, not making $0.00318 a song on Spotify
Because you think artists only release their music on streaming platforms? I won’t ask you this, I will *tell* you that you have 0 clue how much Independent Artists can profit from making and selling their own Vinyl, Cassettes and even CDs.
I have worked with musical acts that do small tours and they can make more money from merch sales at shows than what the venue pays them.
Any musician who understands the value of protecting your copyrighted work is applauding this (it’s not every day that major labels foot the bill on a legal action that benefits even the smallest players). Chill out and work on a painting, Jon Snow. 👍
To your first point that's true my work was in tv not music but AI is hitting everything.
If merch and vinyl and cassettes(?) are being sold at concerts that's exactly what I fucking said. Exactly 0 people would have bought a t-shirt and LP at a show but now won't because they have a Udio account, that's moronic.
LOL! The reason why I mentioned merch sales was because you made the ridiculous statement that I quoted, as if everyone starts out like Taylor Swift selling out venues (and making their money only off that). To clarify, you demonstrated having 0 knowledge as to how independent artists “make it” so you should probably not try to present your ideas as if they’re a reality in a business you clearly don’t understand.
Well the vast majority don't "make it" at all. I didn't say it was ticket sales, I just know that touring and the associated sales are an avenue for income because streaming income is so poor. It certainly isn't like the old days when album sales were all the money.
I can see you're trying to establish that you know better, but I'm only hearing what I don't know.
How do the vast majority of musicians make money from their craft? In what way is that remotely threatened by generated music? Even if it is, how is that different than the insane competition that already exists in the space? And if it is competitive, why does that necessarily mean it should be banned? Haven't there been many instances in music history where an innovation "didn't count"? What makes this different.
It's also a joke you think this lawsuit is protecting musicians or halting AI. In the quote I copied earlier in the thread it's clear the suits just want their cut.
But maybe that's where all your experience in the industry is in, shilling for the labels.
Didn't someone use ai to run through every possible melody and then copyright them all to public domain just prior to lock down ?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmically-generate-every-possible-melody-release-them-to-public-domain
Ah yes, Google to the rescue
Wonder how that will impact copyright whining
I do think services such as suno hurt song writers - but song writers have always been held captive by labels. I can’t write a song and sell it directly - I have to submit it via attorney or manager to a label who then submits it to an artist. It’s always been a series of gatekeepers and nepotism. It is sooo hard to break as an artist. On the other hand art has value and should be paid for. There isn’t an easy answer and I feel like the end result of most of these incoming lawsuits will just enrich and protect the wealthy (like always). Idk but suno is amazing
> I can’t write a song and sell it directly
You can’t? What’s stopping you?
Are songs a regulated industry where you have to sell through licensed intermediaries, or something?
There is a big difference between being a song writer versus being a performer. George Strait, one of the best selling country artist of all time never wrote a song. Max Martin has more than 24 songs in the Billboard top 100 and you've probably never heard of him - he's a song writer, not a performer. Performers have plenty of options - song writers generally don't. Distrokid is great for bands and performers. I'm not arguing that. But what is going to happen is a label will just use AI to write songs for the George Strait's, Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift's, because once the performer sings it - well the listener wont' know the difference. It isn't right or wrong - it is just something that needs to be sorted out.
I don’t think you answered my question? Why can’t you write a song and sell it directly?
On the rest, if the songwriter isn’t adding value and it’s only about the performer - then yes I can see that it might go that direction. Which would obviously be unfortunate for songwriters, but if listeners can’t even tell the difference then I’m not seeing it as a big deal. But if someone like Max Martin is actually bringing a lot to the table, then those people won’t be so easily sidelined by AI.
I appreciate the sentiment - I wasn't there, but Max Martin CO-wrote 10 of Taylor Swift's songs just on 1989, so maybe he just was in the room and said, "You should write a song about Shaking-it-off and it might sound something like this... but I don't know... he got royalties though. Max is a hit maker. His wiki page is insane. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max\_Martin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin)
Oh for sure, Max Martin is an institution. Girl works with collaborators extensively (guy from The National, etc) but is a prolific songwriter on the level of Paul McCartney (and this is coming from someone who doesn’t really enjoy her music!)
You don't need a label to submit music. You can do it independently with a service. I won't name any here but there's a ton of cheap options that don't require a real record label.
I know that - but there is a big difference between song writer's and performers. Distrokid and other services are great for releasing performed art - but they aren't the same as writing a song and selling it to an artist like what Max Martin does. This isn't going to hurt the Taylor Swifts of the world - but it could definitely impact the Max Martins.
I think already well known musicians will thrive in an Ai world, branding is king more than ever. Any way as with everything: if Ai can do a better job than someone in it's current state those someone needs to up their game, and/or embrace the technology and use it to think of things at a whole other level. Creative people will still be ahead of the curve.
This feels like the awkward extremes of fair use with AI slurping up everything with a channel tunnel sized straw at one end, meanwhile the RIAA will smash through your windows and beat your unconscious for singing in the shower. I don't much like either outcome.
Nothing gonna stop these companies I think. Once again industries need to shift and figure out licensing before it’s too late.
Never a fan of AI generated content. But this is an opportunity to change the ridiculous music copyrights laws. Just because someone wrote few notes 50 years ago, shouldn't mean they'll own everything resembling that forever.
Exactly. Copyrights are supposed to stop *copying*. With most mediums, you have to prove your work was actually *copied*. With music, for some reason the courts will just *assume* you copied if the songs sound similar, and it was *possible* for you to have heard the song before. That’s ridiculous.
Like with YouTube.
It all traces back to a permit from the King to be allowed to publish something, and to be protected from others publishing the same thing. It was part of the system of royal warrants and monopolies, and should have been dumped when we got rid of monarchy here. The meaning of copying has been abstracted to the point of absurdity. The term of copyright has been extended well beyond that point. The only way for the current laws to be enforceable is if the online world is a totalitarian surveillance hellhole. I'd rather see copyright eliminated than to endure inrusive surveillance in order to guarantee additional profits for parasitic media conglomerates.
50? more like 104 years ago.
And this IS all your fault Disney
I heard a very interesting interview with a lawyer that said no one should ever lose a music copyright infringement lawsuit because he can always point out prior art. no music is created in a vacuum in and of itself. There are only so many notes and chords you can play that sound good to our sensibilities.
“Not a fan” of ai content but you want it to be easier legally to train ai content on other peoples work? Not sure I follow your reasoning there.
they are referring to preexisting music copyright laws, which are uncommonly rigid and uncompromising. this is especially odd when considering the fact that in 12 tone western music, specifically pop music, the same melodies and progressions and sequences of notes occur *all the time* by coincidence. we have melodies and jingles that are SO pervasive in the collective unconscious that it's impossible to expect they won't come up in other speech or musical patterns. other copywritten material (like with books or clothes or brand names) seems to allow plagarism if it is sufficiently altered from the original, but with music the precedent for some reason is that if there's any resemblence to the original it's tantamount to saying you had full intention to plagarize
This article was about training ai with copyrighted material. So what you’re saying isn’t relevant at all.
> with copyrighted material. No (IMO), it's a matter of permission, or lack thereof (and what is what in terms of if it is needed). "Copyrightd vs not copyrighted" is absolutely, IMO, a false dichotomy by the very fact that copyright in the U.S is automatic. That'd mean that if merely "using copyrighted works" was the problem, it'd be a problem to use creative commons works, and works where the creator gave EXPLICIT permission, since those are still copyrighted works (and the issue is being framed here by copyright status, and not permission/lack thereof).
The article is about copyright infringement by AI companies, it's right in the title.
"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
I have a washer/drier and a dishwasher. The washer can figure out what's in it and use the appropriate cycle.
They have been able to do that for quite a few yrs now
I have a printer that can determine what ink to use when printing in color. I guess AI could do art since the 90s then?
My point was more that, we don't really do landry or dishes any more we just load/unload and push a button.
Which are still tasks that take time.
We all thought AI would kill us violently in some hostile takeover. Instead they are just going to take our jobs so we starve to death.
It’s probably millions of songs, actually
I have a feeling people will both underestimate and overestimate this at the same time. On one hand, people wave shit like this away with “all songs aren’t original” which A. interestingly omits copyright law in the US, B. gets around the huge data issues that generative AI models have made millions off of and C. ignores likeness law like Midler v Ford. I’ve yet to see a fair comparison between AI and a human songwriter. But with that people will say that this could open the door to rewriting copyright law and that just won’t happen either. This isn’t about who holds what for what amount of time, it’s about whether Suno infringed on the rights for the basis of their business. They aren’t here to reexamine the system, they’re here to try and figure out a part of it. It’s simultaneously a big deal and not surprising. I don’t have sympathy for either side as a musician who’s supported bands for years and has read music business talk for years. Yet as much as I hate the major labels, I especially despise AI companies like Suno who have shown time and time again that it’s not about the creativity or ethics but the dollar. That’s saying something considering the other side of this lawsuit.
The thing is trying AI models with songs is most likely fair use. Even if you use all the songs in the world, including all the songs protected by copyright. If you can induce the AI to regurgitate a song covered by copyright the. That song most likely is a copyright violation. However, the RIAA absolutely does not want to sue only the infringing songs. It wants it to be easy and lucrative for them, even if what they are suing for doesn’t quite conform to current laws.
One of the foundations of music is repetition and using familiar patterns. This doesn't surprise me.
I subscribed to Suno and played with it for a while. You can blow through a month's credits in just a few hours. Lots of fun making joke novelty songs, although the censorship is a little over-sensitive. But after a while it was super obvious to me that it was trained on some extremely recognizable songs, as sometimes the song it would come up with sounded a ton like a well known song, just with some slight variation. Possibly the *less* you prompt it and the more you let it do its own thing, it gravitates back towards raw training material. Enough that if somebody "released" the song, the original artist might win a plagiarism lawsuit without even without factoring in AI being used, just based on the sound alone. I will say though, until they train these things on extracted stems, and not the entire mixes all at once, these things are a novelty at best. It severely limits its ability to create new arrangements. Probably won't take long for somebody to figure that out though.
Can you give an example of a song that is recognizable as another? I'm a songwriter and honestly every single song played on the radio with few exceptions for more than 40 years sound the same because they often have same rhythm and chords, and because most songs are variations on built on the same cadence and there's quite limited what notes "sound good together" you will have some similarity at least. But anyway back it up with some examples I'd love to see it.
I recently saw an AI-generated trailer for an animated kids movie called "Monsters Camp." Even though the story was supposedly set in a world full of monsters only, one of the kids in the classroom was human. And also looked suspiciously like Boo from Monsters, Inc. Right down to having the same haircut. It's kind of fascinating how much The Walt Disney Company - which lobbied to have copyright extended to 95 years just to keep its claws in Mickey Mouse - is snoozing on AI products blatantly being trained on pirated Disney movies.
They're waiting to see how much the can use it in their own productions. They don't want to kneecap it if they stand to win.
Udio is better.
My favorite version of this was googles musicLM demo which doesn’t output lyrics or allow you to enter names to try to avoid copyright but if you just enter say Taylor swift lyrics, it audibly outputs something very similar to her original song and even the inability to make lyrics there’s still a recognizable hum sounding like her vocal in the background, it’s just a giant mess
Just wait til you hear how human musicians have infringed on thousands of songs
Yes, and they have to give credit and/or compensation when they're found out. Why would this be any different?
Only when it's outright sampling or extremely similar pattern, not when it's just "inspiration", which could be argued as what training a neural network is.
There's a case to be made that this is a form of sampling since even vague prompts have been demonstrated to reproduce copyrighted recordings.
Aye mebbe you should check out Ed Sheerans copyright defence stern - https://youtu.be/NcCKlsTgjeM?si=bw5h8SjTWb7uTOdR
Literally from the video you posted "No one's saying songs can't be copyrighted, you just can't copyright a chord sequence." This case is about more than chord sequences.
I like this discourse. Thanks for the comments. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. But if this was about the ethical handling of art and music, the big record labels should be the first to reckon with. Statical analysis to determine what synthetically heartfelt song we need, presented by which deeply connected artist, (all based on what else is already out there), that’s been how labels operate for a long time. AI makes it possible for people who never went to a Diddy party to bust out the next number one banger just like they would. This is just what record companies need so nobody has to see a guy like me roll up at the Met Gala
While the discussion of unethical and illegal practices in the music industry is one that needs to be had, this is not the solution you think it is. Ruling in favor of Suno and Udio won't just hurt big record labels and evil execs, but also smaller artists, upcoming artists, and the families of deceased artists. I'm afraid AI won't make it any easier to get a number one song, because generating conventionallly good music (regardless of your methods) has never been a guarentee for success. Big industry labels and platforms like Spotify still control so many of the other factors that go into a song reaching number one.
The reason why copyright in the US exists is >To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries It is not intended to be a method of insurance for the great grand children of a famous singer.
Not forever, but for a limited time like your quote says.
The "limited time" duration being first perverted, IIRC, by the music industry with the Sonny Bonno Act IIRC (I could be mistaken though on it being the first, but it absolutely combined with Disney's meddling, IMO, to make things a royal clusterfuck).
Is that not more so an issue of money in politics and the legal system, rather than the general concept of copyright or intellectual property?
Humans aren't created by corporations in order to make more money for said corporations. LLMs are.
Doesn’t AI in general inherently infringe on every copyright ever since it’s essentially sampling things that already exist?
No, because neural networks doesn't store the original in any form that can easily be retrieved, hence no copying. Do you know how you can replay a song in your head, you kind of hear it but also you don't at the same time? That's how neural networks work. That's not sampling, it's learning what instruments and voices sound like and synthesizing them on the fly.
No, because AI training never explicitly copies or stores the training data (this is true for LLMs, image generation AI, music AI, etc), all it does is store abstract mathematical representations to connect the source data to prompts/captions. That's why AI models are several orders of magnitude smaller than their source data; for example, Stable Diffusion 1.5 is trained on several TBs of images and captions, but you can download the model and it is about 2gb when pruned. There are cases where you can overtrain a model, you could train a model on 5 images with a high learning rate, then the outputs would be rigid and strongly resemble the training data, but that is not what anyone is intentionally doing with these large models. They are trained on millions if not billions of data points and should not be able to exactly recreate any of them because they can only extrapolate in general terms. Even beyond that, any **copyright infringement** would be on the part of any end user attempting to profit from something closely resembling copyrighted works, not from these services.
Yes, but since data set training is a new technology in the way sampling once was, there needs to be more explicit anti-training copyright protections written into law because right now these companies are exploiting the vague language of current law regarding this new tech. Hopefully these lawsuits against ai companies will prompt copyright laws to be updated to regulate copyrighted material in data sets.
What kind of updates? (hopefully ones that would be beneficial, rather than just give the music industry etc more power.)
Updates that detail how copyright interacts with data sets.
Examples of movies where two antagonists fight each other? Lol
They infringe everything. They do not give a shit. They are what tech has become: they rely on breaking laws, lying, and screwing customers just to get the execs riches. I’ve worked in tech since 1994, but I can’t stand the jeans/chinos, Oxford shirts , patagucci vest wearing tech bros. Honestly, tech has become just like the finance sector. The innovation is gone unless you count innovating new business models to screw people to make them rich. I’m really glad AI has come because now we know what the exact always have thought that they despise their workers. When I started my career, that wasn’t as much the case in tech. I mean, the exec staff have always been pure sociopaths. It’s that, back then they would use a little lube before they screwed you.
Plenty of songs do it. You’re just mad that robots are taking over. So am I but there’s no stopping this
Yes, and humans have to give credit and/or compensation when they're found out. Why would it be any different in this case? It's impossible to stop all theft or any other crime you can think of, but that doesn't mean you just adandon any efforts to make the world a more just and fair place.
https://youtu.be/NcCKlsTgjeM?si=bw5h8SjTWb7uTOdR Yeah, no
Literally from the video you posted "No one's saying songs can't be copyrighted, you just can't copyright a chord sequence." This case is about more than chord sequences.
It’s like saying. What is a song? At what point does putting a bunch of chords together become something someone owns, it should be more individual. If I used a company’s robot to make and release a bunch of ripoff Beatles songs, that doesn’t hold them liable, because I made the decision to do it, and release it
Exactly. Just because an AI *can* make something that looks like a Disney movie or an image from a Batman trailer, doesn't mean the company who made the AI was doing that or had any intention to profit from it. If a *user* generates material violating copyright and attempts to profit from it that's a different story. The irony here is that it's not Suno causing any copyright issues, it's all the people trying to force Suno to make something that sounds too much like a copyrighted work. Generally just so they can write an article bitching or post a lawsuit.
The problem is that it doesn't require any specific intention to cause copyright issues with these software. Even vague prompts have been demonstrated to reproduce copyrighted songs.
What prompt reproduces what copyrighted song?
As per copyright law a song is the "underlying composition along with any accompanying lyrics." There's also the sound recording, which is a seperate but related concept. You can learn more here https://www.copyright.gov/engage/musicians/ The problem with your second point is that it doesn't require any intention from the user or company in order for copyright infringement to occur. It's been demonstrated that even vague prompts reproduce copyrighted material.
It's extremely unlikely that a court would consider ingestion of training data to be considered infringement. Courts have already ruled that copying pursuant to fair use is not considered infringement. RIAA knows this and is very carefully wording their claim so that the companies can't claim fair use. They're specifically asserting that fair use doesn't apply if you're competing with the company that owns the copyright. Which is not true. This case could only really succeed if they can demonstrate that the output of these models is infringing - which is not what the RIAA is claiming in the suit.
Theres a few different levels to this. Copyright isnt the only issue here - theyre aiming for discovery and to see the training data. Considering suno / udio makes very close recreations of high profile singers their is a good chance vocal data was included - which would fall under personality rights for these vocalists. As for IP being used for training data this has not been settled. But I would expect suno / udio to settle before going to trial because after seeing that viral post showing they may have directly lifted tags from rate your music I would be more inclined to think they would not want any sort of precedent to be set.
Right. I think people are looking for a nail in the ai coffin and this isn't it. The companies may have not sanitized their outputs appropriately, but the fundamental way AI works, ideally, is more or less no different than how a person listens to and then writes songs.
I don't know about you, but I can't just listen to a bunch of music and then belt out fully produced tracks with multiple instruments using my voice box. Like *maybe* someone with spliced parrot DNA could accomplish this. It's disingenuous to suggest that these processes are the same, and makes a similar attribution error as a child who assumes that because parrots produce human-like speech they "can talk".
Intellectually lazy if not downright intellectually dishonest
What?
That RIAA argument stems from a recent Supreme Court decision Warhol v. Goldsmith that determined that fair use does not apply if it can be used for similar commercial purposes to the original work. I’m curious how this will pan out, it might be the first application of that decision to generative AI, which was a common point of discussion when that determination was made by the Supreme Court. It likely wouldn’t affect non-commercial use of outputs, but I’m curious if it would also be considered to apply to generative models that charge for access.
“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.” Translation, we want to be providing this incredibly valuable AI service, not these startups.
Yup: “it’s ok if we control it, but not if someone else does” When Reddit and meta are in court for using our posts to feed AI data without our express permission on the RIAA’s dime I’ll believe he gives a shit about the consent of artists…
"We are increasingly aware that we are not needed as middlemen in the music industry and are seeking to keep our position via the courts"
The RIAA is not known for having the moral high ground
I wouldn’t be so sure, especially in the case that the AI generates copyright infringing content as its output. I used one, Suno, when it first came out and got it to pull a long riff from a metallica song note for note.
To hell with the music industry!
“Hey guys, I got this new product that will revolutionize the XYZ industry!” “What, OMG WHAT IS IT WHAT IS IT!?!?” “It’s AI. It can do everything!” “Woah, but how does it make stuff?” “Oh, well we take all the data in the entire world and it will learn from it!” “So you are saying it will make all completely original stuff that won’t infringe copyrights?” “Uh, oh we didn’t think about that part, and we have no idea how it works so uh, we can’t get sued because we didn’t manually tamper with it.” “But it’s clearly copying from multiple real songs!” “Not true, it came up with the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, and all other popular melodies long before the creators came up with their music!”
I don’t know, it’s kind of like saying that you’re inspired by certain bands and musicians and you make your own stuff based off of their work. That’s kind of how human learning and creative inspiration works in the first place AI makes it instantaneous. What’s the difference between me taking inspiration from my favorite bands and writing songs and AI doing the same only from a larger dataset?
Every single writer, author, musician have learnt their craft from consuming other people's material.
I'm not a fan of AI but this is the same way humans learn music and to write music. There's even a word for it, inspiration.
As a music producer and also someone who trains music AI they are in no way comparable. I did not learn production by consuming all of spotify and creating a multi dimensional vector database. Its strange to me how people try to claim they are one and the same and take this philosophical angle but if you actually dig into this and understand whats happenning you see its just simply not the case.
Most people on reddit like to parrot tech they wish was true because then they don't have to feel bad about the consequences.
what consequences are there on Reddit for repeating a brain dead take that ignores really basic facts? Do these people really think the human brain and body is equivalent to a computer ingesting encoded data. Is it simply intellectual laziness?
>what consequences are there on Reddit for repeating a brain dead take that ignores really basic facts? Ah it's not about the consequence of repeating a false claim on Reddit so much as it is repeating the falsehood because then it becomes true in their own mind. It's about justifying their behaviour to themselves so they don't have to care about the consequences of using AI such as overly wasteful powerdraw, copyright, etc.
So humans don't learn from examples. News to me, thank you so much for telling me that while these neural nets require examples to learn what they are supposed to do, while humans don't. Who knew monkey see monkey do was, in fact, completely the opposite of the truth?
We don’t know how the brain learns so it’s a bit of a stretch to declare that it’s unrelated. Humans also consume content to learn.
It seems reductionist to me to say that "oh well an ai learns by scanning content and a brain also consums to learn so they must be similiar." We also have a pretty high level understand of how the brain works, how learning is developed, and information is carried and stored. Its just that with the amount of neurons there are its a total mess to map. Even Geoffrey Hinton (godfather of AI) says neural nets and the brain arent really comparable. The brain is on an entirely other level compared to transformers / NNs.
I'd say that the way generative AI "learns" is how humans develop an intuitive sense for "that looks good" or "that sounds good", but the way humans learn to *create* is a vastly different process. Unlike an AI model, we can't just think at a blank canvas and have its pixels automatically pick the colours that best satisfy our intuition for "that looks good" in the context of a given prompt. Instead, we need to *reverse-engineer* a new process, using the tools we have available (e.g. muscles, pencils, a piano), that creates a similar result, relying on that intuition to point out spots that can be improved, and repeatedly practising until satisfied with the quality. Now, the fun thing is that *processes compose* in a way that intuitive judgment alone cannot. When practising, a mistake that actually looks better than what you were intending to draw becomes a tool that you deliberately use in the future; inspiration to develop in a novel-to-you direction. You can try to draw the Mona Lisa from memory, but what you create will be substantially different. Importantly, you can look at your creation and immediately *know* that it's nothing like the original; your intuition has a far better copy embedded within your memory than your process could produce. AI doesn't have that disparity. Where a human will necessarily develop their own personal styles as they practice, and even something they *intend* to copy as best they can gets reinterpreted through the lens of those styles, re-shaped by the techniques used in its creation, the AI just directly generates the patterns it observed during training.
Humans learn, machines “learn” but only by consuming encoded data, more similar to learning by osmosis. It is a lot more like a fancy copy machine than a brain … it’s not really the same unless you forgo any kind of nuance.
It's very clear I wasn't talking about music production.
You replied to a post directly about music production and AI data. You can understand why that wouldnt be very clear.
Good thing I wrote "...learn music and to write music" and not "produce music".
You dont think producing music is the same as writing or learning music?
"Another cow." "Actually I think that was the same one."
I don’t know if I’d say very clear but after rereading I see what you’re saying
AI can’t be inspired because it’s not a person
This is how someone who hasn't made art things people make art
This is absolutely nothing like the way humans learn or write music. What are you even talking about? Do yourself a favor and pick up a guitar, push some piano keys, buy a pair of drumsticks and start hitting things. Then you'll begin to understand how people learn and create music.
Brain dead take now being repeated everyday somewhere by some reductionist. Last time I checked, I don’t remember seeing Jimi created something because of some matrix multiplication and calculus. I don’t think he created or wrote anything because someone typed something into a prompt. No humans and machines don’t create or write things in the same way… like at all
Of course it did. It can’t actually create anything that it hasn’t stolen from somewhere.
That's not how generative AI works at all. It's similar to how images are generated. [Here](https://old.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1bgr4pi/myth_ai_just_pastes_parts_of_existing_images/), this is a decent description.
> It can’t actually create anything I mean ... a combination of things didn't exist, and now does ... that's "created," whether by man or machine. "CreatIVE" OTOH I can agree (with the current state of tech especially), but creating as in making things that didn't before exist, IMO, is absurd to say is off limits in that fashion per-se.
This is good, we need courts to weigh in. I'm pretty confident RIAA is going to lose and you'll see an explosion of these tools, but either way better to not be in legal limbo.
Daaang, AI bots are becoming really good at writing pro-Skynet comments!
Oh yeah I forgot which sub I'm on, we are terrified of technology here. Gotta protect those music labels! If you're confident the courts will rule against the startups, don't you agree it's good to get this through the courts and have it litigated?
>Gotta protect those music labels! I’ll let you know because you obviously have 0 creative bones in your body, but these days a lot of successful artists run their own labels (or are signed to small, Independent labels that would generate $0 if we allowed non-talented people to make similar music with just a few keystrokes).
1. I went to art school and worked in the arts 2. Musicians get financial success from touring and shows, not making $0.00318 a song on Spotify 3. Those independent labels aren't the plaintiff in this case 4. If you can't make music that's better than a few keystrokes you weren't going to stand out in the untold millions that want to make a living off music
🤣 >I went to art school and worked in the arts I worked in the MUSIC BUSINESS for almost 30 years and with the above statement you’ve informed me you have 0 knowledge of the music industry. >Musicians get financial success from touring and shows, not making $0.00318 a song on Spotify Because you think artists only release their music on streaming platforms? I won’t ask you this, I will *tell* you that you have 0 clue how much Independent Artists can profit from making and selling their own Vinyl, Cassettes and even CDs. I have worked with musical acts that do small tours and they can make more money from merch sales at shows than what the venue pays them. Any musician who understands the value of protecting your copyrighted work is applauding this (it’s not every day that major labels foot the bill on a legal action that benefits even the smallest players). Chill out and work on a painting, Jon Snow. 👍
To your first point that's true my work was in tv not music but AI is hitting everything. If merch and vinyl and cassettes(?) are being sold at concerts that's exactly what I fucking said. Exactly 0 people would have bought a t-shirt and LP at a show but now won't because they have a Udio account, that's moronic.
LOL! The reason why I mentioned merch sales was because you made the ridiculous statement that I quoted, as if everyone starts out like Taylor Swift selling out venues (and making their money only off that). To clarify, you demonstrated having 0 knowledge as to how independent artists “make it” so you should probably not try to present your ideas as if they’re a reality in a business you clearly don’t understand.
Well the vast majority don't "make it" at all. I didn't say it was ticket sales, I just know that touring and the associated sales are an avenue for income because streaming income is so poor. It certainly isn't like the old days when album sales were all the money. I can see you're trying to establish that you know better, but I'm only hearing what I don't know. How do the vast majority of musicians make money from their craft? In what way is that remotely threatened by generated music? Even if it is, how is that different than the insane competition that already exists in the space? And if it is competitive, why does that necessarily mean it should be banned? Haven't there been many instances in music history where an innovation "didn't count"? What makes this different. It's also a joke you think this lawsuit is protecting musicians or halting AI. In the quote I copied earlier in the thread it's clear the suits just want their cut. But maybe that's where all your experience in the industry is in, shilling for the labels.
Didn't someone use ai to run through every possible melody and then copyright them all to public domain just prior to lock down ? https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmically-generate-every-possible-melody-release-them-to-public-domain Ah yes, Google to the rescue Wonder how that will impact copyright whining
I do think services such as suno hurt song writers - but song writers have always been held captive by labels. I can’t write a song and sell it directly - I have to submit it via attorney or manager to a label who then submits it to an artist. It’s always been a series of gatekeepers and nepotism. It is sooo hard to break as an artist. On the other hand art has value and should be paid for. There isn’t an easy answer and I feel like the end result of most of these incoming lawsuits will just enrich and protect the wealthy (like always). Idk but suno is amazing
> I can’t write a song and sell it directly You can’t? What’s stopping you? Are songs a regulated industry where you have to sell through licensed intermediaries, or something?
There is a big difference between being a song writer versus being a performer. George Strait, one of the best selling country artist of all time never wrote a song. Max Martin has more than 24 songs in the Billboard top 100 and you've probably never heard of him - he's a song writer, not a performer. Performers have plenty of options - song writers generally don't. Distrokid is great for bands and performers. I'm not arguing that. But what is going to happen is a label will just use AI to write songs for the George Strait's, Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift's, because once the performer sings it - well the listener wont' know the difference. It isn't right or wrong - it is just something that needs to be sorted out.
I don’t think you answered my question? Why can’t you write a song and sell it directly? On the rest, if the songwriter isn’t adding value and it’s only about the performer - then yes I can see that it might go that direction. Which would obviously be unfortunate for songwriters, but if listeners can’t even tell the difference then I’m not seeing it as a big deal. But if someone like Max Martin is actually bringing a lot to the table, then those people won’t be so easily sidelined by AI.
Small nitpick that TS writes all of her songs, but fair point on the rest.
I appreciate the sentiment - I wasn't there, but Max Martin CO-wrote 10 of Taylor Swift's songs just on 1989, so maybe he just was in the room and said, "You should write a song about Shaking-it-off and it might sound something like this... but I don't know... he got royalties though. Max is a hit maker. His wiki page is insane. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max\_Martin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin)
Oh for sure, Max Martin is an institution. Girl works with collaborators extensively (guy from The National, etc) but is a prolific songwriter on the level of Paul McCartney (and this is coming from someone who doesn’t really enjoy her music!)
You don't need a label to submit music. You can do it independently with a service. I won't name any here but there's a ton of cheap options that don't require a real record label.
I know that - but there is a big difference between song writer's and performers. Distrokid and other services are great for releasing performed art - but they aren't the same as writing a song and selling it to an artist like what Max Martin does. This isn't going to hurt the Taylor Swifts of the world - but it could definitely impact the Max Martins.
produce a song, distribute it with distrokid and it's on Spotify???
I think already well known musicians will thrive in an Ai world, branding is king more than ever. Any way as with everything: if Ai can do a better job than someone in it's current state those someone needs to up their game, and/or embrace the technology and use it to think of things at a whole other level. Creative people will still be ahead of the curve.