Veleric t1_j6ewuvd wrote
Reply to comment by frontiermanprotozoa in Google’s MusicLM is Astoundingly Good at Making AI-Generated Music, But They’re Not Releasing it Due to Copyright Concerns by Royal-Recognition493
For one thing, musical components are much easier to identify direct comparisons with than visual art, especially with the diffusion model art uses, which literally rebuilds the image from scratch. Leaving the sourcing of the dataset out of the debate, you will see similar styles, brushstrokes, line art, etc. but that is going to prove very difficult in a legal argument as a direct copy. With music, however, we can much more easily detect a famous riff or melody or whatever that is incredibly distinctive to a particular song, even with slight variations in tempo, instrument, etc.. so it has a much more tangible, quantifiable way to identify a direct copy of a song. I don't know exactly how MusicLM works or how many of the music generators work at this point, and they may still be able to argue that it's been transformed in a meaningful way that did not directly use or replicate, but I do think it will be a tougher battle legally.
In any case, I think it's an inevitable reality that needs to be worked through rather than hidden from.
frontiermanprotozoa t1_j6f11e0 wrote
Drawn art AI gets plenty of hits too, and alleged fair use and other defenses applies to music too. Its purely a power difference. Music industry has been much more litigious and strict on protecting their copyright, while drawn art industry (if you can call it that) was permissive and benevolent to a fault. They are protected by the same laws, these corporations know there is 0 reason why an argument that applies to one cant be applied to other. They were so far successful in blurring the waters with cringy catchphrases like “it learns like humans” (its not a human, important distinction in copyright law and for anyone with common sense) “copyright is arcane anyways should be done away with” (for small artists tho, not for us). Theyre burying their music ais because they dont want to break the illusion they created in publics and lawmakers eyes.
ATR2400 t1_j6g2bse wrote
A lot of the people that have issues with AI art right now are small individual creators on the internet who do some commissions. In comparison like you said the music industry consists of large multi-million and multi-billion dollar corporations. A large coalition of the artists still might not be able to do much damage. Billion dollar companies with expensive lawyers can
[deleted] t1_j6ji2jl wrote
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vgf89 t1_j6g98h3 wrote
There's also just way way more aesthetic visual media than there is good music.
And the limitations music tends to hold itself too makes it incredibly hard to make anything original as a whole. In art, you've got a whole canvas you can fill with whatever you want and have quantifiably more ways to express things. When you've only got so many notes you can play on an instrument to experiment with, you'll randomly come across melodies that are extremely similar to things others have already made until you go back and think "hey wait that sounds like something... Oh it's basically the The Office theme"
Every possible 8 or 12 note melody (on a standard scale, anyways) fits in 601 GB. And despite how easy it might be to land on someone else's melody because only a small subset of melodies actually sounds good, some artists have been extremely litigious when it comes to "copying" melodies. Supposedly it's a pretty big problem on the jazz scene too. Plus sampling pieces of other songs tends to only be defendable if you're making a parody (ala lots of Lemon Demon's discography) or reach a certain bar for transformativeness that's much easier to reach in visual mediums. Not to mention that instrument/sfx samples tend to come from big packs that are separately licensed, so if you sample them from another song you may be trampling the copyrights of the instrument pack.
In visual arts, there's much more freedom. In digital, you've got at least 255x255x255 possible colors per pixel, canvases can get massive, and the combination of art styles and subjects are essentially infinite. And if you train a small 4GB AI on hundreds of terabytes of images, it's going to learn how to reproduce common subjects and concepts, styles, etc without physically being able to copy any one copyrightable element. There are outliers where something very exact and specific appears too often in the training data (Getty logo, and arguably the Mona Lisa, characters, for instance), but that doesn't detract from the AI being able to produce what are wholly new pieces of art that don't infringe on copyrights, and I question whether an AI being able to reproduce Micky mouse constitutes as the AI itself infringing copyright rather than the user infringing if they publish said image.
Point is, there's a good legal argument that image generation tends to not infringe copyrights (it lands squarely in fair use because it isn't copying/memorizing training data, barring people using it in stupid ways) while music generation AI could frequently spit out arguably copyrighted stuff due to the sheer numbers difference between training on over a billion unique images vs a much smaller number of songs that have fewer distinct pieces that make them unique (and a much more litigious music industry that wrongfully protects tiny note snippets that probably shouldn't be copyrightable in the first place).
Maybe music AI will get better, but it sounds like a lot more work needs to be done there (or Google's just scared of the MPAA RIAA), and the case law on music copyright would also have to change.
czk_21 t1_j6je4my wrote
well written description of differences
as you said Every possible 8 or 12 note melody (on a standard scale, anyways) fits in 601 GB and these combinations are natural occurence and they are placed under zero copyright, shouldnt this apply to google product or even to the original songs- u know since there is finite number of this combination ppl can come with sam or similar idea completely independently, also many songs have already similar melodies for whatever reason
there should be no copyright for just the melody but for song a whole
SnapcasterWizard t1_j6izs2b wrote
>while drawn art industry (if you can call it that) was permissive and benevolent to a fault.
Ah yes, an industry with titans such as Disney are known to be permissive and benevolent to a fault!
[deleted] t1_j6jhzlf wrote
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