Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here. Hope you're doing well because the world of copyright right now and artists' rights sure aren't.

Yes, it is another significant and necessary update on the modern day hellscape that AI is currently ushering the music world into, as we do potentially right now have some landmark, but a very bad legislation coming out of the UK on this front, and also a somewhat big artist protest in response to it.

Now, as I've said before on this channel in regards to generative AI, especially in cases where it is trained on copyrighted material. I'm sorry if this conversation is already going over some people's heads, but we will link to content we've previously made on this topic to bring a bit more context. But as of right now, across the Internet, you have these supposed artificial intelligence models, creating content of different stripes, whether that be visual or auditory.

Now, I know there's a lot of press and pitching around these models that make them seem like they're smart and the way the future and intelligent and sentient, when in fact, in many cases, especially as we have seen in the music world, what's going on with a lot of this AI is that it is being fed the music of other well-established artists and popular songs songs as a means of teaching these programs to essentially recreate this stuff and then be able to presumably profit off of this generated material without necessarily having to credit the artists whose work might have been used to train this AI model, which is really just stealing from these artists and repackaging their work and not crediting them or paying them in the process.

Now, one of the most significant fronts on this ongoing artist AI battle right now is the right of artists to be credited and be paid and be attributed in some way. Just have it be acknowledged that the work of artist X or Y or Z is being included in the training of whatever AI company or AI model happens to use a particular song or album, whatever it is, whatever media is fed into that AI model. Right now, there is some legislation moving through Parliament in the UK that would essentially soften those expectations. AI companies would essentially just be able to willy-nilly train their models on whatever music or copyrighted works they please.

With multiple outlets reporting this, from what I understand, there will be a provision in there to allow artists to opt out of having their music used used or included in such models. But how that will be implemented isn't quite clear. And honestly, why should the onus be on the artist to either broadly say or go to every individual AI company and say, No, I don't want my work included in your training models, when it should be the companies developing these AI models that approach each artist or copyright holder individually to ask permission for this, much in the same way that you might if you wanted to do a big commercial release for a record that had a sample of a song in it or something. So honestly, even with that opt-out option there, I feel like this legislation is just putting too much of a burden with this on artists.

Artists in the UK, unfortunately, have been left to try to pull together a bit of a protest effort, which I have mixed feelings on. Granted, I'm glad that about a thousand different artists have come together to speak out against this situation – and some pretty big names are in the mix, too. We have Kate Bush, we have Damon Albarne of Gorillas fame, Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics, Imogen Heap, composer Hans Zimmer as well.

Apparently, they're all involved in this compilation that has just been released, which is 12 tracks. The entire run time of the comp is silent, and it's been released under the name 1,000 UK Artists, which in a lot of these articles covering this protest has created a bit of a who's on first situation because the album has been released, the compilation is out there, but how are we finding it? You can't find it under any of the respective names of the artist involved in this protest. No, you literally need to go on to Spotify and search 1,000 UK artists in order to find it.

And then beyond there, the cover and the album title doesn't even make it apparent what is being protested because the title is a vague, smarmy-ass question, which again, doesn't really speak to anything unless you went into this whole situation, having read an article about it or maybe seen this video, you don't know where this compilation is from, who's involved, what this question even means. It's not until you look at the tracklist, which makes a pretty bold statement against AI, that you actually get what this whole thing is about.

So, yeah, honestly, if this is supposed to draw people's attention to this situation, I don't foresee it working all that well. Maybe something with a bolder statement in the title of the album would have worked better, and maybe having some of the artist's names attached to the project or having each artist upload the project themselves to their respective pages on music stream platforms. However, I get that their hands may be tied in terms of various record label contracts they may have out there.

This protest effort seems to have been pulled together pretty quickly, and having every single artist here, all 1,000 of them, if there are even, in fact, that many, I'm sure there are. But having all of them respectively release this album at the same time would most likely involve some lawyers and some discussions with labels. Maybe a bit of a warning to Spotify as well, considering how hostile the platform has been to releasing silent albums in the past, too.

But yeah, while I have seen some decent music industry press around on this topic, there hasn't really been a whole lot of social media, organic social media chatter from what I've caught. It's a bit of a shame because honestly, this is a very bad direction for this AI-based legislation to be moving in right now. The first step that could make any of this even a little bit better is to force these companies into a position that if they are to incorporate some copyrighted work, regardless of what it is, into their AI models, that they pursue the permission of the rights holder, the creator of that work, and they attribute them, they pay them, or they just don't use their work at all if they are not given permission.

Again, the onus of seeking that permission out should be on the AI company, should be on the people who are developing that AI model, not the artist, not the rights holder. It'll be artists with no resources, no recourse, and are most likely new to the industry, too, who are going to be hit by this the hardest because they're the ones who are going to be building their careers and coming out with their records and unknowingly just making the art they want to make without knowing they may have to announce it to somebody or chase down individual AI companies to tell them, 'Oh, yeah, don't rip off my music, please', which again is why this legislation is bullshit and just a terrible direction for things to move.

But yeah, not good news on this front. Really not good news at all. I'm hoping there are some better developments to come, maybe more of an effort on the part of labels to defend the creative works of their artist roster. This stuff still needs to be regulated, and these corporations developing these AI models need to be brought to heel and be given parameters within which they can operate, or else they're just going to be using their AI models to steal other artists' work with no repercussions.

Those are my thoughts on this situation. Let me know yours down in the comments.

Anthony Fantano. Forever.

"If you're putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you're not going to have them." - Sir Paul McCartney