Freedom Line Blog

However else one opines on the merits or perils of artificial intelligence (AI), everyone of good faith can agree that it mustn’t become a tool for brazen copyright infringement.  Artists who pour their (sometimes literal) blood, sweat and tears into their creative works shouldn’t have those works stolen and exploited by AI bots.

That is particularly true as it relates to AI music generators specifically created for that exploitative purpose.

For that reason, we should all welcome and applaud major record labels for their decisive lawsuit against AI generators Suno and Udio, whom they accuse in their complaints of copyright violation on an “unimaginable scale.”

The complaints make for gripping reading unlike most legal filings, but we’re not talking here about sampling various songs or “fair use” or ambiguous similarities between songs.  We’re talking about wholesale theft, scraping songs for exploitation, which not only punishes artists but America’s entire world-leading music industry.

The complaints can be – and should be – read in their entirety here and here, and we should welcome this effort to enforce creators’ IP rights, regardless of how the broader AI landscape continues to expand.

File under “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.”

Somehow, it actually seems like a farcical April Fools’ Day headline, in fact.  Google, with its deep history of scraping and scanning other sources’ substantive content for its own uses, now objects to OpenAI using YouTube content to train its text-to-video generator:

The use of YouTube videos to train OpenAI’s text-to-video generator would be an infraction of the platform’s terms of service, YouTube Chief Executive Officer Neal Mohan said.”

Optimists might hope that Google is finally recognizing and preparing to correct its wayward course, while realists and cynics will roll their eyes at what they’ll label naivete.  As the old adage goes, however, “every saint has a past, every sinner has a future,” so we’ll maintain hope.