Google today issued MusicLM, a new experimental AI tool that can turn text descriptions into music. Available in the AI Test Kitchen app on the web, Android, or iOS, MusicLM lets users type in a prompt like “soulful jazz for dinner” and lets the tool create different versions of the song.
When Google previewed MusicLM in an academic paper in January, it said it had “no immediate plans” to release it. The article’s co-authors pointed out the many ethical challenges a system like MusicLM poses, including the tendency to include copyrighted training data material in the generated songs.
But in the intervening months, Google says it has collaborated with musicians and organized workshops to “see how (the) technology can enhance the creative process.” Make of it what you will.
In any case, it seems unlikely that the broader challenges surrounding generative music will be easily resolved.
In 2020, Jay-Z’s record label filed copyright complaints against a YouTube channel, Vocal Synthesis, for using AI to create Jay-Z covers of songs like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” After initially removing the videos, YouTube restored them and found that the takedown requests were “incomplete”.
But deepfaked music still stands on murky legal grounds.
Image Credits: Google
Increasingly, homemade songs those using generative AI to conjure up familiar sounds that can be passed off as authentic, or at least close enough, are going viral. Music labels have been quick to notify streaming partners of them, citing intellectual property concerns. And they generally won (unlike the Jay-Z case) — Spotify DELETED tens of thousands of AI-generated songs from startup Boomy in the past month.
a white paper written by Eric Sunray, now a legal intern at the Music Publishers Association, argues that AI music generators such as MusicLM violate music copyright law by “creating tapestries of coherent audio from the works they record during training, thereby infringing reproduction rights of the United States Copyright Act. ” It may not be long before there is some clarity on the matter. Multiple lawsuits their way through the courts is likely to affect music-generating AI, including one involving the rights of artists whose work is used to train AI systems without their knowledge or consent.
But time will tell.
