Fireside Chat: Music and AI, Part 3: The Ethics of AI Music: Consent and the Future of Musicians

In today’s episode, we dive into the ethical dilemmas surrounding AI music. You’ll join a critical discussion about consent in the digital age, exploring how AI challenges traditional notions of ownership and attribution in music creation. We’ll also discuss the future of musicians in a world where AI can generate music on demand, exploring potential career paths and the enduring value of human artistry. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation on the ethical considerations and future implications of AI-generated music.

Fireside Chat: Music and AI, Part 3: The Ethics of AI Music: Consent and the Future of Musicians

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Christopher S. Penn – 00:01
In this five-part series on music and AI, filmed at the 2024 Marketing AI Conference, or MACON, I sit down with composer Ruby King to discuss AI music and the future of creativity. This is part three, the ethics of AI music, consent, and the future of musicians. So, based on what you’ve heard, what would be, to you, the use cases for using this type of output? I imagine things like, for example, hold music.

Ruby King – 00:30
The quality of phone lines — is anyone going to be able to actually hear it properly? Exactly. I mean, we have Vivaldi Spring on our hospital line, and that’s so crackly that it may as well just be a rat playing it. Yes. So wait things — that does work for the quiet backgrounds of music, videos, too. But it does depend how lively it is because that is quite lively, and it’s got quite a strong feel to it. You kind of want to move to it a little bit. So if you’re doing a talk and that is playing, then obviously no. But that’s the same if you had a piece that’s performed, and you’ve got the rights for it to have it there, you’ve still got to choose your music wisely. That doesn’t change whether it’s AI or not.

Ruby King – 01:24
That performance sounded like a good, well-recorded piano, and it sounded at least 99% possible to play, I believe. It is hard to tell listening like that, but there was none of it where I was thinking, “Okay, these hands are not happening.” You’ve seen those things where you can make the piano sound like a voice, but you can’t do it with your fingers because it uses too many frequencies all at the same time to make it sound like it’s saying —

Christopher S. Penn – 02:06
— you need 14 fingers on each hand.

Ruby King – 02:08
More. Yeah. There is a wide variety of use cases, as much as I hate to say it.

Christopher S. Penn – 02:17
Okay, so talk about that.

Ruby King – 02:18
Yeah. Okay. Why I hate to say it?

Christopher S. Penn – 02:22
Yes. Because there’s sort of this push and pull of the AI side of things, saying, “Hey, this is a great substitute,” say, for royalty-free music, where you get your stock — whatever — download of your 200,000 songs, all of which are pretty much that. Or you can have something that’s custom-made by a machine that is equally — but you don’t have to pay $49.95 for it.

Ruby King – 02:53
Yeah. Okay. I suppose it comes down to two things. One of those is morals. So I mean, you can try and —

Christopher S. Penn – 03:01
— ignore morals, but many people do.

Ruby King – 03:04
Yeah. So when it’s royalty-free music or something, then someone has given their consent for it to be that, usually. I think it’s — if you’re buying the pack, then somewhere along the lines, the musician got money. They went, “I’ve written this piece. Do you want it?” They went, “Yes, we want it. You either have no royalties to it,” or whatever the signage is, depending on where it is, I guess. “Can we have it?” “Yes, you can. Here’s some money.” Probably not enough, but okay, deal done. That is given with consent.

When it comes down to AI, there is not much consent around here, and people seem to have a very decent understanding of when consent is involved with things of a nature that is not necessarily IP and might be more related to humans. And while it may not seem as bad — non-consensual anything else — when you are using AI to write music, it’s still without consent. You are using other people’s work, effort, and time without their consent in order to write something for yourself when you could have paid them either nothing — they might have given it to you for free — or a very small pittance. Musicians don’t make a lot. There is — you could get it for a little bit of money and sleep better at night, maybe.

Christopher S. Penn – 04:33
Okay.

Ruby King – 04:34
But in the way of, “Is it actually better to have a musician do it for the end product?” More and more, the answer is becoming it’s not that important because it is improving. I would say right now, it’s not perfect enough for musicians to be completely ruled out because there are issues with it. When you are listening to it, depending on the level of your training or the amount you care, it’s not right. There are issues with it. But if you really don’t care, and it’s for something that you’re not willing to pay any money for, and you’re, “I can just generate this. Why would I pay anyone for it?” Well, yeah, sure, okay. If you don’t care, then it works.

It does the job that you want it to do, and it does that very well in a lot of cases. I have listened to some Bach or Mozart that’s AI-generated. So it’s not actually them, but it’s told to — yeah, exactly. And it sounds fairly convincing. It sounds like it might actually be an orchestra playing it.

Christopher S. Penn – 05:42
Right.

Ruby King – 05:44
But there’s no real melody to it, and it’s kind of — it’s not quite right. But if you’re doing — if you’re studying and you’re listening to that at the same time, for the sake of not having something that you know and are singing along with in your head, then it works. It does the job. A lot of AI is increasingly going to just do the job, and it is a concern for musicians and composers that it is just improving and improving. It’s using our work without our consent to do so and thus taking away quite a lot of the importance of teaching music, which is already at the bottom of the barrel in quite a lot of countries, including England.

It should be more important. But if the tech industry keeps doing this, then the tech industry will become more important, music will be less important, and then we have a — this is a whole different topic. I’m really sorry.

Christopher S. Penn – 06:39
Well, the consent thing is important because, yes, companies — Suno and Mubert — allegedly, because this is in court, you have to say allegedly, otherwise lawyers come out — did ingest large amounts of copyrighted music. And there’s one industry that’s really good at suing people: it’s the music industry. However, one of the biggest repositories of music consent is baked in, and that is YouTube.

When — if you look at the terms of service for YouTube — any material you upload to YouTube, you grant Google a perpetual license to make derivative works of your content in perpetuity, anywhere in the universe, and that includes AI models. So Google could take all the YouTube music that’s been given to it and say, “Well, you signed the terms of service, you agreed to it. And therefore, this model that we have now built from your work, you consented to.”

Christopher S. Penn – 07:36
In a case like that, if Google then rolls out the music generation model, which they have, how does that change the moral aspect?

Ruby King – 07:47
I don’t think morals — I don’t think the moral aspect changes too much because if you’re trying to justify your morals by going, “Here, in the fine print, it said I can do what I want,” then your morals need looking at. Legally is different to morally.

Christopher S. Penn – 08:06
Yes. And legally, Google is on solid ground, whereas Suno is not necessarily.

Ruby King – 08:11
Yeah. So it kind of comes down to, as well, the Disney situation did — whoever — I don’t know the full story of that, but they’re kind of trying to get — because they signed up for Disney Plus.

Christopher S. Penn – 08:23
Oh, yeah, the whole thing.

Ruby King – 08:24
Yeah. Did they actually consent to that? Is it morally right to go, “Oh yeah, but you signed your life away when you signed that little box because you wanted to watch the Marvel movies at home. How dare you? How very stupid.” Did you actually consent to that? No, but we are in a society where if you do not agree to the terms and conditions, you can’t use the service. You cannot use the service.

For musicians, there are so many — there’s not actually that many companies that will help you be heard. So Spotify, Apple Music — there’s lots of others, but they are smaller and less used. You have to be on those if you want your music to be accessible to people because that’s where people are. You have to go there. It doesn’t mean I necessarily want to agree to the terms and conditions, but if I want to have a chance in heck of having that being heard by anyone, then you’ve got to upload there. The same with Facebook or advertising on Instagram. You have to have an Instagram page. You have to have a Facebook page to say, “Hey, this is where the people are. I have music I think you would like to listen to, and I’d like you to listen to it. Here’s a link on something that you probably have. Go listen to it.”

Along the lines, in order to be able to do all of that, you must have signed your life away at least 50 times, and there is no choice but that. You can’t be a musician in this day and age and have your music heard without signing your rights away. That’s a really difficult position to be in because we don’t want to sign those rights away, but you kind of have to take it as a risk.

Christopher S. Penn – 10:02
Cost of doing business.

Ruby King – 10:03
Yes, it’s kind of what you have to do. And now — but there never seemed to be anything that was happening that was bad, and now it’s, “Oh, AI has gone, ‘Hi. We stole all of your stuff a while ago because you consented to it, just to be clear. So that’s done now. Thank you. Bye.’” “Oh, okay. Yes, we did sign the things, but we had to. Is it really consent if you are forced to do it?”

Christopher S. Penn – 10:34
So from the perspective then of a musician or any composer, what is — what is your play to ensure that you have a career?

Ruby King – 10:45
Find a different field? I mean, that’s true at the moment, but no. I think it — I know it’s something you say. It was trying to have a personality and being a personality, I think that is a big thing of it. I’m terrified of that. I have accounts on multiple different social media platforms, but they are nothing as me — I am not the profile picture. I can’t do selfies. I look like the polite cat. It just doesn’t work, so I don’t really have them. I happily tweet about other things, but no one needs to know about me. I’m quite happy.

But you need to if you want to be successful because people need to see the behind-the-scenes in order to get as much justification for listening to it, because it could always be — it could be AI, or I could just listen to something else. It’s difficult. But another thing is creativity because, at the moment, AI is doing better. It is throwing in some creativity. However, it’s not always doing it right. So something else that musicians need to do is be themselves, be creative, and sort of think about it from the perspective of a listener. “Would AI do this?” You were saying that it’s sort of statistical.

Christopher S. Penn – 12:10
It’s all probability.

Ruby King – 12:10
Yeah, if it’s all probability, then do against — go against the probability. If your piece feels like it should end, don’t end it. Do a different section. Do a B section, maybe do a C section. Do something else that makes the listener go, “Oh, okay.” Because AI is doing that. But if you do it more, you win.

Christopher S. Penn – 12:30
And then you end up with Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, which is three songs smashed into one.

Ruby King – 12:34
Sure. But it does depend because you do have to be careful because not all creativity is necessarily going to be palatable. You can’t just chuck every single thing you could do musically into one basket and go, “This is not AI, I promise. Listen to it. You will love it.” Because you don’t want to hear a piece that changes key every five minutes, and all the lyrics are really strange, and then it suddenly goes into French, and the tempo changes so many times you’re getting used to it, then suddenly it changes. You’re just going to be, “I don’t — too much is too much.”

Humans have to know when that too much is just for the sake of it. If you want to do that anyway, then that’s fine. But that has to be an intentional choice that I don’t want people to sit here and think, “This is music I’m listening to for fun.” Usually, there are pieces where it’s — it’s a choice that you’re listening to it. That’s perfectly okay.

There’s a piece that’s sort of representing dementia, and it’s — I think it’s about seven hours. It’s a long one. I haven’t sat through it — I would have been very upset if I’d sat through the entirety of that — but it’s a very interesting thing to do with music because it was actually using samples of other older music, ballroom music. So it wasn’t quite the same, but it was doing a lot of compositional aspects with it and changing it to represent the stages of dementia. But to listen to that, it’s more of an art experience.

Ruby King – 13:59
AI might have been able to do it, I suppose, but a human would have had to put a lot of thought into it to go, “And at this stage, humans experience this. So you will do this to the music.” There still would have had to be a lot of humanity behind it to do it. I think that’s by The Caretaker, if anyone wants to look that up. Good luck. It’s very depressing.

Yeah, there’s a lot of different things with that kind of thing. But music, in order to stay ahead of the AI, you’ve got to keep an eye on AI as well. You can’t just go, “AI will do its thing, and I will do mine.” You sort of have to stay up-to-date with what it’s doing. If the voices are better — I mean, if you can play live instruments and add those to your tracks, do so because of the humanity of the stuff will help because AI doesn’t have that right now. So use it as an advantage. Do that. Sing on your pieces if you want lyrics, or have a choir. You can have choir patches, and the choir patches are more realistic than AI choir because they also move at once. It’s more like a chord pack, more synthy, which is fine, but it’s not a choir. So trying to do a church thing, it’s not quite right. I don’t know.

Christopher S. Penn – 15:15
It —

Ruby King – 15:16
It is difficult because it will always be improving. To some extent, I think in the end, if there is no more legal help coming to save us, then it will be more of a case of — it will be down to the ethics and preferences of the people who used to pay you and listen to your music as to whether you can still put food on the table from your music or if that’s even an option in the future. It’s a very sad, unfortunate situation, and I hope it’s not the case, but I do think that is very possibly the way that it is going, especially having seen the way that artists are being treated at the moment. Music was only a bit behind that, and as always, things kind of don’t go the way you want them to.

Christopher S. Penn – 16:07
That’s true.

Ruby King – 16:07
Yeah.

Christopher S. Penn – 16:08
Well, so having — having that AI portion is essentially going to be the mass-produced music, and then you will have the individual artisans who — people follow that musician because of that person and their musical skills. A machine could do probably very similar music, but you’re there for that person specifically. So it is almost building a cult of personality around you as a musician or a composer, etc., so that you have that army of true fans that are willing to support you because of who you are as a human being.

Ruby King – 16:50
And that also comes down to finding your own sound, too. So if you have a preference for the way that you prefer to write music, or music that sounds good to you, then that sort of becomes your sound. And that was true of artists, and then they said, “Oh, do this art in the style of XYZ.” And then it scanned all their art and did that, and that kind of took that out of the water, and it probably will with music, too. It has. If you say “Taylor Swift,” then you get a lot of Taylor Swift-ish music, and that’s only going to improve, probably. Although you said that the data —

Christopher S. Penn – 17:22
Well, so one of the challenges with music, in particular, is there are not actually that many songs. AI needs enormous amounts of data to train on. For example, a text language model needs between seven and ten petabytes of data of raw text to give you a sense of how much data that is. That is a bookshelf that goes around the equator of the planet twice in raw text.

Ruby King – 17:48
Okay, it’s quite big.

Christopher S. Penn – 17:49
Yes, it’s quite large. There aren’t that many songs.

Ruby King – 17:52
No.

Christopher S. Penn – 17:54
So you would have to upsample by essentially repeatedly training a model, “Hey, here’s a song again. Keep learning from it.” Or, in the case of things like music on YouTube, “Here’s the original. Here’s the 18 cover band versions of this song,” so that you can learn the predictable next sound of what should come next.

Ruby King – 18:17
Yeah. Musicians are taught to do the same thing. One of the main things you are taught as a composer starting out is, “Listen to other people’s music. Decide what you like. Decide what you don’t like, and do that. But then try and be creative about the way you do that,” because, obviously, plagiarism is frowned upon. So yeah, if finding a voice is important, but it isn’t going to save you. Finding a voice is hard enough on its own. You would hope that would be enough, but apparently nothing is.

Christopher S. Penn – 18:52
That concludes part three. Thanks for tuning in, and stay tuned for part four! See you on the next one! If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.

Fireside Chat: Music and AI, Part 3: The Ethics of AI Music: Consent and the Future of Musicians

Machine-Generated Transcript

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