The Web3 Music Association (W3M), a new global music industry trade body that aims to “facilitate industry-wide research and development” has officially launched. W3M brings together prominent entities from the music, finance and technology sectors to “collaborate, explore and harness advanced technologies” including artificial intelligence, blockchain and mixed reality.
Source: New music industry trade body The Web3 Music Association launches
A research team led by the University of Texas has come up with a model called Ambient Diffusion which they claim “gets around” the issue of copyright and AI image generators by feeding the model images that have pixels missing — in some cases as much as 93%. “Early efforts suggest the framework is able to continue to generate high-quality samples without ever seeing anything that’s recognizable as the original source images,” reads a press release.
Source: AI Image Generator Avoids Copyright Issues by Training on Corrupted Photos
San Francisco-based blockchain-powered music platform Audius has partnered with rights administration platform Music Reports to power the licensing of rights and payments to music publishers through its Songdex Marketplace opt-in licensing platform. The new partnership follows Audius’ launch of its music marketplace last year, which provides a platform for its 6 million users to support artists with direct payments.
Source: Audius partners with Music Reports to power rights clearances for music publishers
Sony Music Group last week began sending legal letters to roughly 700 AI developers and music streaming services demanding detailed information on whether, how and by what means the recipients or their affiliates have used SMG-owned content “to train, develop or commercialize any of your AI systems,” and a “description of the manner in which such SMG Content was accessed and/or reproduced and/or extracted by you or your affiliates or any third party contracted to do so on your behalf.”
The text of the letters has not yet been released publicly. Sony separately posted a “Declaration of AI Training Opt-Out” on its website.
LinkedIn has announced it will begin adding labels to in-stream content created by generative AI so its users better understand the posts they are interacting with. To carry out the labeling process, the business-to-business social network is partnering with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a project that aims to develop technical standards for certifying the origins of digital content.
Source: MediaDailyNews: LinkedIn Begins Labeling AI-Generated Content
After years of Meta steadily walking away from news on its platforms, the company’s new AI tool is now using the work of those outlets for content. Meta’s new chatbot, Meta AI, is happy to scan news outlets and summarize their latest stories and headlines for anyone who asks. It’s even doing it in Canada, where the company banned links to news sources on Facebook and Instagram in August to get around a law that could require it to pay publishers.
Source: Meta walked away from news. Now the company’s using it for AI content
Suno has been soaring in popularity ever since a Rolling Stone article earlier this year described how the AI tech’s ability to create authentic-sounding music unnerved even some of its creators. The algorithm uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate lyrics, and its own proprietary algorithms to generate music and vocals. However, speculation has grown that Suno’s model was trained on copyrighted music without license from the rights holders.
Source: AI music generator Suno raises $125m, valuing company at $500m (report)
If giving people money encourages them to create, then surely giving them more money would encourage them to create more music, right? As one of us has documented empirically, the answer is actually no. Throughout music history, copyright’s incentive has often been dialed up too high and, counterintuitively, has led to less creativity.
Source: How copyright is killing creativity — except Taylor Swift’s
Actor Scarlett Johansson said she turned down OpenAI‘s request for her to lend her voice to a conversational ChatGPT system — and that she was “shocked” and “angered” that the company went ahead and used a voice that sounded very similar to hers anyway.
WIN’s AI manifesto comes as music companies around the world navigate the complex new world of AI, working to maximize the technology’s potential for artists and businesses while addressing challenges such as deepfakes of artists and the unauthorized use of copyrighted music in training AI models. “The global independent music community welcomes new technological developments which respect the value of music and creators’ rights,” WIN CEO Noemi Planas said.
Source: Worldwide Independent Network calls for creation of AI ‘licensing marketplace’ in new manifesto