@chaban : My original intent, before getting derailed, was basically to start this discussion. Thank you for following up!
AI generated music is only days, perhaps weeks away, not years. I expect most of it to suck at the start – early clues suggest that lyrics are difficult for AI and I expect we’ll find other short-comings as well. But, I suspect that electronic dance music without lyrics will be the first “genre” to get acceptable AI generated music. Coming very soon.
Collectively we need to work out how to handle this, because we can clearly see that some problems are headed toward us. If ChatGPT is any indication, if people can enter some text and create music, then a wall of new music is going to be created, including a fair number of charlatans who are going to pass off AI music as their own. And these people will turn up at MusicBrainz and try and index this music as their own creation.
And yes, if they typed in the prompt to create the track, one could argue that they are the artist and the AI is their instrument. That doesn’t feel wrong to me. But at the same time, it doesn’t sit well either.
I’ve been on the sidelines of the music industry long enough to remember old dinosaurs from the industry lament that electronic music producers are not “real musicians”. But, it is clear that these DJs possess quite a lot of skill to produce this music, so who is to say who is “real” and who is not?
We find ourselves at such a crossroads and we could be the “get off my lawn” folks and want to just keep out all AI. That doesn’t seem right, nor does trying to index every MusicGPT result to ever come out of it.
We’ll need to find a nuanced approach to many sticky questions. Let me list off the questions I already see:
- List item Are “MusicGPT” user considered artists? Why or why not?
- List item If a MGPT user comes to MB and enters their tracks, what should our response be? Clearly some tracks are going to be worthwhile to index because at least some people will love them. But a whole pile of them will be rubbish. But since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, where do we draw the line?
- List item Do we have a different response to people who are passing off MGP output as their own musical creations (e.g. fraud) and people who are direct and honest about it?
What other tricky questions do you see coming? Perhaps a good intermediate goal is to collect questions that we feel we need to answer. I doubt we’ll find many answers immediately, which I think is ok. I would think that they main purpose of this thread is to start being aware of the questions and issues.
We can then see how the world reacts to these issues – court cases are already flying with few clear ideas as to how they might play out. Fortunately the text and image AI fields are going to spawn lawsuits and difficult decisions before music arrives in the same predicament. We may have some time to really wrap our heads around this issue before we’re forced to make policies and enforce them.
Fingers crossed!
Upload to bandcamp\spotify\etc. Another bot farm then plays the tracks to get registered in the charts… Who needs a human in that chain?
