Author | Punk Editor | Fan Zhihui
Since the global popularity of ChatGPT, various AI covers have begun to emerge.
Overseas, AI Rihanna began singing Beyonce's songs, and AI Kanye is covering Plain White T's "Hey There Delilah"; In China, AI Wang Xinling on station B is singing "Set Horse Pole", and AI Sun Yanzi is singing "Qilixiang".
Training AI with a singer's voice, and then letting AI cover songs, whether it is on Douyin and B stations in China, or TikTok and YouTube abroad, is a rare "new trick". Joe Coscarelli, a reporter for The New York Times, called them "harmless larks," and when AIGC content was posted on the Internet, everyone laughed, creators reaped traffic, and everyone was happy.
Until the cover of "Heart on My Sleeve", sung by AI Drake and AI Weeknd, became popular on streaming, and the shrewd online marketing of its anonymous creators, the Universal Music Group behind it could no longer sit still and take the lead in this AI panic that broke out first in Europe and the United States.
Invisible ghosts and visible panic
"A ghost, a ghost of AIGC, roaming the music industry."
If Universal Music chooses to write an AI Manifesto one day, this sentence is likely to become the first sentence of the opening.
Last weekend, a song called Ghostwriter977, "Heart on My Sleeve," went viral. Ghostwriter977 trained the AI model with the voices of Drake and The Weeknd, while mimicking the duo's musical style, resulting in a song.
In the video posted, Ghostwriter977 dressed as a ghost wearing sunglasses plays a song he has composed. It's worth noting that even though the publisher didn't mention Drake and The Weeknd in their vocal messages, "Heart on My Sleeve" was still a hit.
After becoming popular on TikTok, the full version was uploaded to Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube and other platforms, and the song continued to attract attention. As of Monday afternoon, the song had been viewed more than 600,000 times on Spotify, more than 15 million views on TikTok, and the full version had been played more than 275,000 times on YouTube.
Some fans believe that the song is "better than Drake's own song", but others believe that the song created by the artificial intelligence is "so good that it feels dangerous". For many people, this is the first AI music to go out of the loop, and the comment "This is the first AI song that really impressed me" received more than 75,000 likes.
And the mysterious ghost creator seems ready to hide his fame, only to briefly introduce himself, "It's just beginning..."
This was the beginning of Ghostwriter's use of AIGC and a sign of Universal Music's accelerated intervention in AIGC issues.
The popularity of "Heart on My Sleeve" quickly attracted the attention of Universal Music. James Murtagh-Hopkins, senior vice president of communications at Universal Music Group, the record label behind Drake and The Weeknd, issued a fiery statement: "Using our artists to train AI-generated content violates both our license and copyright law. ”
In response to Universal Music's complaints, "Heart on My Sleeve" was the first to be removed from Spotify and Apple Music. YouTube, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, Tidal, Deezer and TikTok also dropped the song. But the issue of restrictions on AI access is still unknown.
In Universal Music's view, the proliferation of AIGC is taking the music industry to a more far-reaching issue: "The availability of AI-generated content on streaming platforms raises the question of which side of history all stakeholders in the music industry ecosystem want to be on: on the side of artists, fans, and human creative expression, or on the other side of deepfakes, fraud, and deprivation of art to be compensated." ”
As a result, in addition to removing AI songs, Universal Music also asked music streaming platforms such as Spotify to cut off AI companies' access to their internal music, preventing developers from using their copyrighted music to train AI models, and treating this as infringement. Universal Music also said in a statement posted on Billboard that "music platforms have a legal and moral responsibility to restrict infringers from using its services" and that "we will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of musicians."
While Drake and The Weeknd did not comment on the incident this time, Drake had previously commented on Instagram about another AI song trained by his voice, "Munch," "This is the last straw, AI." ”
Obviously, Ghostwriter is also the last straw, after the limit of patience, the industry giants have opened up resistance to AI music panic.
AI that crosses the line and blurred boundaries
In the face of AIGC, the most important issue before the meeting of human art is the intellectual property issue that Universal Music is accusing.
With the fire of ChatGPT, AI's super content generation and output capabilities are not limited to the music industry, but have already penetrated into text, images, videos and other industries, so that all walks of life have to face the potential risks of AIGC.
On January 23, 2023, three cartoonists in the United States filed a class action lawsuit against three AIGC commercial application companies, including Stability AI, in the Northern District Court of California, alleging infringement of the Stable Diffusion model developed by them. Along with this, the AI image generation tool developed based on the above model also constitutes copyright infringement.
This was followed by public accusations in the literal field of AI infringement. On February 15, 2023, Wall Street Journal reporter Francesco Marconi said that Open AI has captured a large number of articles from Reuters, The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC and other foreign mainstream media for model training, but has not obtained relevant authorization.
Based on AIGC's copyright disputes, scholars and lawyers began to explore the boundaries of AIGC's "fair use." In the United States, the Copyright Act has a "four-factor analysis" to clarify whether the original content constitutes fair use: (1) the nature and purpose of the use; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work being used; (3) the number and substance of the portion of use relative to the entire copyrighted work; (4) The impact of the use on the potential market or value of the copyrighted work.
Based on the four-factor analysis method of the Copyright Law, AIGC content is difficult to be included in the scope of fair use.
On the one hand, as the four cartoonists of the lawsuit Stability Diffusion point out, the model used by AIGC is nothing more than "a complex collage tool" that stores and merges countless copyrighted content without producing new forms of expression that produce new features or values that distinguish them from the original work. Although the Copyright Act encourages "transformative use" to promote the prosperity of the content industry, it is clear that the purpose of AIGC use is not consistent with the requirements of copyright law.
On the other hand, under the background of the gradual maturity of AIGC technology and the increasing convenience of interactive operation, the cost of AIGC is getting lower and lower, and the content generated and produced is increasing, which will squeeze or even replace the original market of the used works to a large extent.
As a result, large record companies represented by Universal Music are bound to firmly oppose using their copyrighted works as a corpus and training AI models to generate works for commercial purposes.
At the same time, many industry organizations are also taking action. On March 16, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), together with more than 30 social groups including the American Independent Music Association, the American Federation of Musicians, the American Publishers Association, the International Recording Industry Association, and the Recording Academy, formed a broad alliance of musicians and artists to jointly launch the "Human Artistry Campaign" to ensure that AI will not replace or "erode" human culture and art.
In this campaign to aim guns at AI, the coalition proposed "seven principles for the application of artificial intelligence."
These principles point out: technology has long empowered human expression, and AI is no exception; Human-created works will continue to play an important role in our lives; The use of copyrighted works, as well as the use of the voices and likeness of professional performers, requires authorization, licensing, and compliance with all relevant state and federal laws; Governments should not enact new copyright or other intellectual property exemptions that allow AI developers to exploit creators without permission or compensation.
The initiative also emphasizes that copyright should only protect the unique value of human intellectual creativity; Credibility and transparency are essential for the success of AI and the protection of creators; The interests of creators had to be reflected in decision-making.
As Michael Nash, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Universal Music Group, previously stated, "The core 'knowledge' that most AI possesses comes from vast amounts of copyrighted content. However, its application did not seek permission from the original authors and did not compensate them. More commonly, simply producing large quantities of imitations dilutes the market, makes it harder for the original work to stand out, and violates the artist's legal right to compensation. ”
And once we jump out of the intellectual property category of Universal Music and stand in Google's position, AIGC content also introduces it into the "paradox" with its subsidiary YouTube.
On the one hand, user-uploaded AIGC-type videos have become a growing content trend on YouTube, followed by a series of protests from copyright companies. To this end, the YouTube platform has chosen to support the claims of copyright holders, listing many controversial works by YouTubers to support the creation of human artists. On the other hand, Google is doing its best to build AI-generated content tools like Bard, diluting the existing content economy.
In the near future, platforms like Google will inevitably have to deal with the confrontation between YouTube and Brad.
For more human artists who are interested in Drake and The Weeknd, AIGC content is wearing away the seriousness in their work, allowing the human emotions in those works with rich layers of content to gradually dissipate, sound but intangible.
In the Heart on My Sleeve controversy, tech culture writer Lauren Chanel came out to criticize AIGC's playful expression on the seriousness of music: "Pulling Kanye or Drake's hands and turning them into puppets worries me. In her view, humans are underestimating "what is needed to create art."
In the New York Times, Lauren Chanel's accusations and questioning of AI Kanye and AI Drake are no different from last year's boycott of virtual black idol FN Meka, which sees AIGC content involving black groups as a dissolution and ridicule of their culture.
But in the music industry, there are artists like Holly Herndon, who chose to use her voice as "nutrients" to train the AI, and made an AI voice model called "Holly+" for other music lovers to use. It is worth mentioning that although she chose to embrace AIGC, she still adheres to the autonomy of artists in AIGC.
She founded a company called Spawning and launched the "HaveIbeentrained" program for artists to search for their work in AI training libraries. While this currently only provides artists with a back-check function and does not remove their own work from the library, it does contribute to the establishment of the AIGC Code.
"Exploring this technology is more promising than shutting it down." Holly said.
epilogue
The development of ethics and values always lags behind the development of technology.
After the ChatGPT fire, many people often compared the Internet when they mentioned the rapid development of AI. It took 7 years for the Internet to reach more than 100 million users, while ChatGPT took only 2 months. The "Moore's Law" of the AI world has just begun and is unstoppable, but the establishment of the legal and ethical order behind the technology has never accelerated significantly.
This is the source of the panic created by AI.
At the same time, it may also indicate that the controversy surrounding AIGC will continue for a long time to come.
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