Universal asks Apple and Spotify to stop AI-generated music for not respecting copyright

Universal Music Group (UMG) urged streaming music platforms such as Apple Music either Spotify to block the training of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, because with this they would be violating the copyright of the songs they use.

The record label said it believes that certain AI systems “could have been trained on copyrighted content” without obtaining the necessary consents and without paying financial compensation to the creators of such works.

The record label assures that it will not hesitate to “take measures” to protect the rights of its artists, according to emails to which it has recently had access. Financial Times.

In this way, it has asked the companies dedicated to these content services in streaming that block generative AI developers from accessing their music catalogues.

“A lot of the generative AI is trained on popular music. You could say: I want to compose a song with lyrics like that of Taylor Swiftthe voice in the style of Bruno Mars and that it resembles a song of Harry Styles. The result you get is because the AI ​​has been trained on the intellectual property of those artists,” a related source commented.

Google already has a service that generates music from text, MusicLMtrained with a data set of 280,000 hours of music and which, for the moment, the company has not released due to a “risk of possible misappropriation of creative content”.

This is because researchers from the technology company would have discovered that around 1% of the music generated by this AI was an exact replica of the work with which it had been trained, that is, material protected by copyright.

It should be remembered that this is not the first time that professionals in the artistic sector have shown their concern about the possibilities of artificial intelligence and its ability to circumvent certain limitations designed to protect the ‘copyright’ of its creators.

For example, last January a group of artists sued three companies dedicated to digital art -Stability AI, DeviantArt and Midjourney- for infringing copyrights in the development of artistic works created by AI with the tool stable diffusion.

As a consequence of this problem, researchers from the University of Chicago created a solution called glaze that seeks to protect the works made by artists and prevent them from ending up training artificial intelligence models.

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