6 ms·

Tennessee becomes the first state to protect musicians against AI

31 points by greenie_beans 3y ago

paulmd 3y ago
Bit weird for them to do Elvis impersonators like this (voice is now protected as part of your image). Surely that’s protected speech…
vouaobrasil 3y ago
> Once the law takes effect on July 1, people will be prohibited from using AI to mimic an artist's voice without permission. Good on them, but we need to do more: we need to prohibit the commercial sale of AI-generated art as well. What about combining 2-3 voices in a new voice? It should be prohbibited. And training on all human-made media needs to be banned also.
- artninja1988 3y ago
  ...why?
  - kurthr 3y ago
    I'll go a step further, how? Sure it makes sense for a music center like Nashville to do this, but for the entire rest of the world? You can't block them from the source material without destroying the entire industry. So you'll just move the generation elsewhere. To be fair humans have "sounding like" each other down to their vocal tics since time immemorial. You could label (secret key, ledger, hash) legitimate artist recordings and then just shame unmarked (illegitimate) ones. I'm not even sure you could get a national law to "protect the owner", but unless you get rid of the internet you're not going to enforce it effectively. All you can do is reduce its profitability.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Because AI will significantly damage society and we should be exceptionally cautious about it.
- postexitus 3y ago
  While I agree with sentiment - it's a slippery slope. At what point does "training" stop. Is sampling an instrument "training"? Is trying to mimick other artists/instruments via electronic means (i.e. Autotune) "training"? Pandora's box is open and there is no way of closing it - besides consumer preferences.
  - BadHumans 3y ago
    You're being obtuse on purpose. Is sampling an instrument training an AI? No it's not. Is autotune AI? No it's not.
    - warkdarrior 3y ago
      Ha, ha, this is the perfect loophole. My not-AI music system will imitate your voice by sampling instruments in just the right order and with the right timing. It's only sampling instruments!
      - dorkwood 3y ago
        How did you get it to sample those instruments in just the right order and with the right timing?
        postexitus 3y ago
        Exactly - how will the law define what the training is and what a carefully composed sequence of event is? You need legal definitions - cannot just say "oh yeah sampling is not training"; whereas it is training of a sample size 1.
        dorkwood 3y ago
        You're both missing my point, which is that the original poster's "not-Ai music system" would have still needed Ai at its core in order to replicate human voices with tiny instrument samples. How else would it know what the voices are supposed to sound like?
- rightbyte 3y ago
  I'd rather abbolish copyright, patents and ip laws in general. Just keep trademarks. There is no patching of this broken system.
  - 1shooner 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, is your livelihood not at least indirectly reliant on intellectual property?
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Ye it would probably get ugly for me and my collegues. But we would all would be better off in the long term I think. But I dunno really. The IP or copyright in it self does not seem that important compared to like, "networking" of the sales people and trust in that shit gets done at B2B level. I mean people still pays for Office and Windows even though free as in freedom and beer alternatives exist. Book authors would be screwed. I admit that.
- interestica 3y ago
  If a new human artist emerges that sounds a lot like a previous AI artist, is the human prevented from producing music commercially?
  - krapp 3y ago
    It seems unlikely that a law intended to prevent AI from impersonating existing human artists would prevent a human artist from doing anything other than using AI to impersonate another human artist. However other laws related to copyright infringement might still apply, given that in context, "sounding a lot like a previous AI artist" means "sounding indistinguishable from an existing human artist."
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    No, the AI should not be allowed to function except in extremely restricted circumstances and it should have no rights.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Exciting times ahead. It wouldn't be real art if people such as yourself weren't clutching your pearls over it. Go ahead -- make your rules, pass your laws, drive it underground. Throw the rabbit right smack-dab into the middle of that briar patch. (Yes, I know, don't feed the trolls...)
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Haha, if I had enough power to pass rules and make laws, AI would be destroyed already.
- visarga 3y ago
  > And training on all human-made media needs to be banned also. You're right. Companies would need to implement draconian "content attribution systems" to scan all creative works to ensure no training data was derived from copyrighted sources. This could result in a "chilling effect" where creators self-censor for fear of their original works being flagged as infringing simply due to incidental similarities. Because now we have to scan every human work, as it might have been generated with AI. It opens up the prospect of expensive litigation over subconscious inspiration or vague resemblances to prior works. Taken to the extreme, it could hamper creativity and innovation by making any new work legally risky to publish if AI analysis deems it too "similar" to something else.
- krapp 3y ago
  >And training on all human-made media needs to be banned also. I'm as anti-AI as anyone, and most AI generated content is laughably inferior to the real thing, gross and vapid and dehumanizing, but I feel like training on human-made media is fine so long as it's voluntary, the rights of the author or artist are respected, and they're compensated for their effort. Of course, that would mean retaining human employees and paying them as artists and designing the workflow of AI around making them more productive, instead of firing them all for prompt engineers or Turkers for pennies on the dollar, which would make AI less profitable than it could possibly be, which is why it will never happen.
mcbuilder 3y ago
Tennessee is a very right of center libertarian type state, yet they all are very happy to engage in "protectionism" when it comes to their signature country music.
- plussed_reader 3y ago
  Laws for me and rules for thee!
- lupusreal 3y ago
  > "Tennessee is a very right of center libertarian type state" If that's a bad thing, then you're praising them for not being that way this time, right? Or are you criticizing them for not living up to your negative expectations? Edit: Oh, I think I got it now. You're saying that normally right-leaning libertarianism is a bad thing, but in this case it would be a good thing. Doesn't that mean you're compromising your principles?
  - mcbuilder 3y ago
    For what it's worth, I think the law is an overreach. They are basically trying to outlaw a mathematical set of transformation from a training set of data to and an input file to an output file. I don't even think you should be able to patent NN weights or algorithms or their derivatives. But it's not clear here who judges if the output is "Taylof Swift" enough. There is this creator on YouTube who makes "bad versions" using AI, I guess they aren't welcome in TN. I'm against this law because it seems impossible to enforce, what happens when some guy in China trains a Garth Brooks LoRA? You can't run inference? I think parody rights are protected, or should Weird Al makes sure he doesn't auto tune too close. I guess my perspective on TN isn't nuanced enough, and people are calling me out on associating TN and "Libertarianism" and I'm calling them out on what I see as very non-free behavior.
- waihtis 3y ago
  it's not protectionism when you're defending something from theft
woah 3y ago
Here's Hank Williams singing "Straight outta Compton" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSMaN6zAJYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSMaN6zAJYc Listen while you still can
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bwanab 3y ago
I haven't read the actual law, but the description of it sounds like it's limited to things like imitating an artists voice. Certainly it makes sense to not allow a recording that claims to be Luke Combs singing, oh, say his new song "Fast Car"[1]. But, does it mean one couldn't create a voice that sounds a lot like Luke Combs as long as it's well labelled as AI-generated? [1]Yes, I know it's a Tracy Chapman song.
- russdill 3y ago
  There's a lot of room for artistic expression that could be protected under the 1st amendment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnEIeVWLtbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnEIeVWLtbU
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  > But, does it mean one couldn't create a voice that sounds a lot like Luke Combs as long as it's well labelled as AI-generated? I don't think so. It amends previous protections preventing folks from using an artist's likeness to include voice. I don't think you could, for instance, create a TV commercial using someone's image and simply label it as AI to get around those protections. The whole point of the law is to protect the likeness of a person. If you can just slap a label on it that would make it pointless.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
  I'm sure someone might try to argue that the AI generated song might constitute something like an "AI cover", but I would disagree. The issue is the creative act. Humans are creative and can emulate or even "cover" a song as close as possible and it's still largely protected as long as you don't explicitly mislabel it as the original or attempt to pass it as the original ("original" in this sense being the rights holder and owner). An AI generated song, I would argue, is not really "creative" in the same sense. It's not even really a cover. It's a generated output built on the original IP to a degree that is well beyond human capacity because it's not human at all. It's machine generation and not artistic creation. People like to conflate the two, but they're being wilfully ignorant of the clear differences between the two. Prompting an AI model to output something is not the same thing as making it oneself. The only human element of an AI song is the prompt and not the output. It's more likely that an AI song should and will be treated in the same way as clearing a sample in hip-hop, for example, even though it's also different in important ways.
floor2 3y ago
This headline is infuriatingly backwards and offensive. Extending the government-enabled monopoly power of the establishment media to prevent new art, technology and creativity from competing should not be treated as a good thing or as "protecting" them. Rather than extending copyright to unprecedented new levels to strangle AI in the crib, we should be overjoyed that billions of people will now be enabled to use new tools to create art, music, poetry, and literature tailored to their specific desires. We could be on the cusp of a new utopia, of empowerment of the average person and incredibly diversity of the creative arts... or we could watch as a handful of corporations get laws passed to give their cartel exclusive control of what music, film, art and literature gets published.
- visarga 3y ago
  It's the NIMBY playbook. The ones who have claimed a stake in the space try to block others from entering. Cutting the ladder under them.
- roody15 3y ago
  Agreed our current system is setup to maximize rents by large corporations and private equity groups. It is quite a stretch to say this protects “musicians”. Great so some John Lennon songs will be “protected” … despite his lack of being alive.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Yea, the news media always seems to use the word “protect” for these laws rather than “restrict” because they are morally aligned with the usual copyright cartel companies (publishers and studios), rather than morally aligned with end users. They are all fully aligned and share the goal of “strangling AI in the crib” as you eloquently put it. It’s going to happen, too, nationwide, because we always seem to give these Media Landlords outsized political power.
- rustcleaner 3y ago
  >Rather than extending copyright to unprecedented new levels to strangle AI in the crib, we should be overjoyed that billions of people will now be enabled to use new tools to create art, music, poetry, and literature tailored to their specific desires. No this is terrible for the purposes of propagandists. We live on human-farms and are managed by our governments and technocratic elite, through propaganda and incentive systems which increase in violent coerciveness the more we assert our individual sovereignties. You never signed that social contract you're following. The magic of the Magi is in control of the human psyche, the magic is in the last mile to human awareness. That knowledge has been passed down for millennia through esoteric occult teachings. I digress. Propagandists must be able to serve their content without competing counterinforcements. You being able to generate your own porn privately with complete creative sovereignty (assuming a morally "flat" bias model) will destroy almost all avenues the propagandist has to influence your local sexual kink progressions (progressively slippery slope from vanilla college co-ed softcore towards slap porn or cuck porn). Porn too far fetched? How about being able to write reams of coherent novels with whatever the reader believed to be right and just? No amount of post-OWS woke identity politics propaganda (paid for by Wall Street, to take the OWS heat off them) can counter the sheer volume of counterinforcement autists like myself could churn out. One benefit to the propagandists: people will probably atomize as our social protocols decay from lack of authentic critical feedback, as we all increasingly huff our own generated supplies.

31 points by greenie_beans 3y ago

Bit weird for them to do Elvis impersonators like this (voice is now protected as part of your image). Surely that’s protected speech…

vouaobrasil 3y ago

> Once the law takes effect on July 1, people will be prohibited from using AI to mimic an artist's voice without permission. Good on them, but we need to do more: we need to prohibit the commercial sale of AI-generated art as well. What about combining 2-3 voices in a new voice? It should be prohbibited. And training on all human-made media needs to be banned also.

artninja1988 3y ago
...why?
- kurthr 3y ago
  I'll go a step further, how? Sure it makes sense for a music center like Nashville to do this, but for the entire rest of the world? You can't block them from the source material without destroying the entire industry. So you'll just move the generation elsewhere. To be fair humans have "sounding like" each other down to their vocal tics since time immemorial. You could label (secret key, ledger, hash) legitimate artist recordings and then just shame unmarked (illegitimate) ones. I'm not even sure you could get a national law to "protect the owner", but unless you get rid of the internet you're not going to enforce it effectively. All you can do is reduce its profitability.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Because AI will significantly damage society and we should be exceptionally cautious about it.
postexitus 3y ago
While I agree with sentiment - it's a slippery slope. At what point does "training" stop. Is sampling an instrument "training"? Is trying to mimick other artists/instruments via electronic means (i.e. Autotune) "training"? Pandora's box is open and there is no way of closing it - besides consumer preferences.
- BadHumans 3y ago
  You're being obtuse on purpose. Is sampling an instrument training an AI? No it's not. Is autotune AI? No it's not.
  - warkdarrior 3y ago
    Ha, ha, this is the perfect loophole. My not-AI music system will imitate your voice by sampling instruments in just the right order and with the right timing. It's only sampling instruments!
    - dorkwood 3y ago
      How did you get it to sample those instruments in just the right order and with the right timing?
      - postexitus 3y ago
        Exactly - how will the law define what the training is and what a carefully composed sequence of event is? You need legal definitions - cannot just say "oh yeah sampling is not training"; whereas it is training of a sample size 1.
        dorkwood 3y ago
        You're both missing my point, which is that the original poster's "not-Ai music system" would have still needed Ai at its core in order to replicate human voices with tiny instrument samples. How else would it know what the voices are supposed to sound like?
rightbyte 3y ago
I'd rather abbolish copyright, patents and ip laws in general. Just keep trademarks. There is no patching of this broken system.
- 1shooner 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, is your livelihood not at least indirectly reliant on intellectual property?
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Ye it would probably get ugly for me and my collegues. But we would all would be better off in the long term I think. But I dunno really. The IP or copyright in it self does not seem that important compared to like, "networking" of the sales people and trust in that shit gets done at B2B level. I mean people still pays for Office and Windows even though free as in freedom and beer alternatives exist. Book authors would be screwed. I admit that.
interestica 3y ago
If a new human artist emerges that sounds a lot like a previous AI artist, is the human prevented from producing music commercially?
- krapp 3y ago
  It seems unlikely that a law intended to prevent AI from impersonating existing human artists would prevent a human artist from doing anything other than using AI to impersonate another human artist. However other laws related to copyright infringement might still apply, given that in context, "sounding a lot like a previous AI artist" means "sounding indistinguishable from an existing human artist."
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  No, the AI should not be allowed to function except in extremely restricted circumstances and it should have no rights.
CamperBob2 3y ago
Exciting times ahead. It wouldn't be real art if people such as yourself weren't clutching your pearls over it. Go ahead -- make your rules, pass your laws, drive it underground. Throw the rabbit right smack-dab into the middle of that briar patch. (Yes, I know, don't feed the trolls...)
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Haha, if I had enough power to pass rules and make laws, AI would be destroyed already.
visarga 3y ago
> And training on all human-made media needs to be banned also. You're right. Companies would need to implement draconian "content attribution systems" to scan all creative works to ensure no training data was derived from copyrighted sources. This could result in a "chilling effect" where creators self-censor for fear of their original works being flagged as infringing simply due to incidental similarities. Because now we have to scan every human work, as it might have been generated with AI. It opens up the prospect of expensive litigation over subconscious inspiration or vague resemblances to prior works. Taken to the extreme, it could hamper creativity and innovation by making any new work legally risky to publish if AI analysis deems it too "similar" to something else.
krapp 3y ago
>And training on all human-made media needs to be banned also. I'm as anti-AI as anyone, and most AI generated content is laughably inferior to the real thing, gross and vapid and dehumanizing, but I feel like training on human-made media is fine so long as it's voluntary, the rights of the author or artist are respected, and they're compensated for their effort. Of course, that would mean retaining human employees and paying them as artists and designing the workflow of AI around making them more productive, instead of firing them all for prompt engineers or Turkers for pennies on the dollar, which would make AI less profitable than it could possibly be, which is why it will never happen.

mcbuilder 3y ago

Tennessee is a very right of center libertarian type state, yet they all are very happy to engage in "protectionism" when it comes to their signature country music.

plussed_reader 3y ago
Laws for me and rules for thee!
lupusreal 3y ago
> "Tennessee is a very right of center libertarian type state" If that's a bad thing, then you're praising them for not being that way this time, right? Or are you criticizing them for not living up to your negative expectations? Edit: Oh, I think I got it now. You're saying that normally right-leaning libertarianism is a bad thing, but in this case it would be a good thing. Doesn't that mean you're compromising your principles?
- mcbuilder 3y ago
  For what it's worth, I think the law is an overreach. They are basically trying to outlaw a mathematical set of transformation from a training set of data to and an input file to an output file. I don't even think you should be able to patent NN weights or algorithms or their derivatives. But it's not clear here who judges if the output is "Taylof Swift" enough. There is this creator on YouTube who makes "bad versions" using AI, I guess they aren't welcome in TN. I'm against this law because it seems impossible to enforce, what happens when some guy in China trains a Garth Brooks LoRA? You can't run inference? I think parody rights are protected, or should Weird Al makes sure he doesn't auto tune too close. I guess my perspective on TN isn't nuanced enough, and people are calling me out on associating TN and "Libertarianism" and I'm calling them out on what I see as very non-free behavior.
waihtis 3y ago
it's not protectionism when you're defending something from theft

woah 3y ago

Here's Hank Williams singing "Straight outta Compton" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSMaN6zAJYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSMaN6zAJYc Listen while you still can

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bwanab 3y ago

I haven't read the actual law, but the description of it sounds like it's limited to things like imitating an artists voice. Certainly it makes sense to not allow a recording that claims to be Luke Combs singing, oh, say his new song "Fast Car"[1]. But, does it mean one couldn't create a voice that sounds a lot like Luke Combs as long as it's well labelled as AI-generated? [1]Yes, I know it's a Tracy Chapman song.

russdill 3y ago
There's a lot of room for artistic expression that could be protected under the 1st amendment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnEIeVWLtbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnEIeVWLtbU
bastawhiz 3y ago
> But, does it mean one couldn't create a voice that sounds a lot like Luke Combs as long as it's well labelled as AI-generated? I don't think so. It amends previous protections preventing folks from using an artist's likeness to include voice. I don't think you could, for instance, create a TV commercial using someone's image and simply label it as AI to get around those protections. The whole point of the law is to protect the likeness of a person. If you can just slap a label on it that would make it pointless.
beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
I'm sure someone might try to argue that the AI generated song might constitute something like an "AI cover", but I would disagree. The issue is the creative act. Humans are creative and can emulate or even "cover" a song as close as possible and it's still largely protected as long as you don't explicitly mislabel it as the original or attempt to pass it as the original ("original" in this sense being the rights holder and owner). An AI generated song, I would argue, is not really "creative" in the same sense. It's not even really a cover. It's a generated output built on the original IP to a degree that is well beyond human capacity because it's not human at all. It's machine generation and not artistic creation. People like to conflate the two, but they're being wilfully ignorant of the clear differences between the two. Prompting an AI model to output something is not the same thing as making it oneself. The only human element of an AI song is the prompt and not the output. It's more likely that an AI song should and will be treated in the same way as clearing a sample in hip-hop, for example, even though it's also different in important ways.

floor2 3y ago

This headline is infuriatingly backwards and offensive. Extending the government-enabled monopoly power of the establishment media to prevent new art, technology and creativity from competing should not be treated as a good thing or as "protecting" them. Rather than extending copyright to unprecedented new levels to strangle AI in the crib, we should be overjoyed that billions of people will now be enabled to use new tools to create art, music, poetry, and literature tailored to their specific desires. We could be on the cusp of a new utopia, of empowerment of the average person and incredibly diversity of the creative arts... or we could watch as a handful of corporations get laws passed to give their cartel exclusive control of what music, film, art and literature gets published.

visarga 3y ago
It's the NIMBY playbook. The ones who have claimed a stake in the space try to block others from entering. Cutting the ladder under them.
roody15 3y ago
Agreed our current system is setup to maximize rents by large corporations and private equity groups. It is quite a stretch to say this protects “musicians”. Great so some John Lennon songs will be “protected” … despite his lack of being alive.
ryandrake 3y ago
Yea, the news media always seems to use the word “protect” for these laws rather than “restrict” because they are morally aligned with the usual copyright cartel companies (publishers and studios), rather than morally aligned with end users. They are all fully aligned and share the goal of “strangling AI in the crib” as you eloquently put it. It’s going to happen, too, nationwide, because we always seem to give these Media Landlords outsized political power.
rustcleaner 3y ago
>Rather than extending copyright to unprecedented new levels to strangle AI in the crib, we should be overjoyed that billions of people will now be enabled to use new tools to create art, music, poetry, and literature tailored to their specific desires. No this is terrible for the purposes of propagandists. We live on human-farms and are managed by our governments and technocratic elite, through propaganda and incentive systems which increase in violent coerciveness the more we assert our individual sovereignties. You never signed that social contract you're following. The magic of the Magi is in control of the human psyche, the magic is in the last mile to human awareness. That knowledge has been passed down for millennia through esoteric occult teachings. I digress. Propagandists must be able to serve their content without competing counterinforcements. You being able to generate your own porn privately with complete creative sovereignty (assuming a morally "flat" bias model) will destroy almost all avenues the propagandist has to influence your local sexual kink progressions (progressively slippery slope from vanilla college co-ed softcore towards slap porn or cuck porn). Porn too far fetched? How about being able to write reams of coherent novels with whatever the reader believed to be right and just? No amount of post-OWS woke identity politics propaganda (paid for by Wall Street, to take the OWS heat off them) can counter the sheer volume of counterinforcement autists like myself could churn out. One benefit to the propagandists: people will probably atomize as our social protocols decay from lack of authentic critical feedback, as we all increasingly huff our own generated supplies.