AI, Music, Ethics, and a New Generative AI foundation model

Beatoven AI founder says hallucinations in foundation models are a feature in music, not a bug.

- BY KUL BHUSHAN

The music industry is no stranger to copyright battles. But the rise of AI generated music is making things more complicated. While a creator can claim originality for an AI generated track but then the AI models are themselves trained on vast amounts of copyrighted material. Case in point is Suno vs independent artists. The platform is essentially a generative AI creation platform that helps create realistic songs including vocals and instrumentations. The startup last year raised a massive $125 million in series A funding, likely one of the largest in the domain. Artists have accused the AI company of using their music without requisite license or permission to train the AI models, and subsequently, infringing upon copyright. The case is likely to have a larger impact. For instance, a lot of creators rely on such AI platforms to create content and also dodge the punitive copyright strikes imposed by the big labels. YouTube too has very stringent laws on copyrighted content. Violating these guidelines, YouTube may either take down the video, suspend the channel, block content, or stop ad-revenue sharing. Suno reportedly maintains that even if its AI have been trained to copyrighted content, the platform delivers completely new sounds which does not infringe upon anyone's intellectual property.