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Creators Demand Tech Giants Fess Up, Pay For All That AI Training Data 55

Posted by BeauHD from the vanilla-ization dept.
The Register highlights concerns raised at a recent UK parliamentary committee regarding AI companies' exploitation of copyrighted content without permission or payment. From the report: The Culture, Media and Sport Committee and Science, Innovation and Technology Committee asked composer Max Richter how he would know if "bad-faith actors" were using his material to train AI models. "There's really nothing I can do," he told MPs. "There are a couple of music AI models, and it's perfectly easy to make them generate a piece of music that sounds uncannily like me. That wouldn't be possible unless it had hoovered up my stuff without asking me and without paying for it. That's happening on a huge scale. It's obviously happened to basically every artist whose work is on the internet."

Richter, whose work has been used in a number of major film and television scores, said the consequences for creative musicians and composers would be dire. "You're going to get a vanilla-ization of music culture as automated material starts to edge out human creators, and you're also going to get an impoverishing of human creators," he said. "It's worth remembering that the music business in the UK is a real success story. It's 7.6 billion-pound income last year, with over 200,000 people employed. That is a big impact. If we allow the erosion of copyright, which is really how value is created in the music sector, then we're going to be in a position where there won't be artists in the future."

Speaking earlier, former Google staffer James Smith said much of the damage from text and data mining had likely already been done. "The original sin, if you like, has happened," said Smith, co-founder and chief executive of Human Native AI. "The question is, how do we move forward? I would like to see the government put more effort into supporting licensing as a viable alternative monetization model for the internet in the age of these new AI agents."

Matt Rogerson, director of global public policy and platform strategy at the Financial Times, said: "We can only deal with what we see in front of us and [that is] people taking our content, using it for the training, using it in substitutional ways. So from our perspective, we'll prosecute the same argument in every country where we operate, where we see our content being stolen." The risk, if the situation continued, was a hollowing out of creative and information industries, he said. [...] "The problem is we can't see who's stolen our content. We're just at this stage where these very large companies, which usually make margins of 90 percent, might have to take some smaller margin, and that's clearly going to be upsetting for their investors. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't. It's just a question of right and wrong and where we pitch this debate. Unfortunately, the government has pitched it in thinking that you can't reduce the margin of these big tech companies; otherwise, they won't build a datacenter."

Creators Demand Tech Giants Fess Up, Pay For All That AI Training Data More | Reply

Creators Demand Tech Giants Fess Up, Pay For All That AI Training Data

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  • it aint AI destroying the creative industries. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Friday February 07, 2025 @06:30PM (#65151007)
    "vanilla-ization of music culture " pretty sure it aint AI that is guilty of that, it is purely self imposed, 99% of music nowadays just like movies is cut and paste from what has previously worked and they do it because surprise surprise that's what works for the general public.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 )

      "99% of music nowadays"

      the most popular music has often (not always) been bland by the measure of others' - I don't think anybody has a hard time grappling with the notion that art with the widest appeal will be bland

      there's also the fact that as generations age, they tend to find what is popular today sucks. what was popular in their days was awesome.

      "but 99% of music nowadays" says more about you than it says about reality

      basically, you haven't made so much of a point as outed yourself as yet another old

      • There is so much art accumulated over the decades online that any new work competes againt a vast sea of alternatives. This makes royalty revenues insufficient for living. It's a content-post-scarcity, attention-scarcity economy now, based on ads and enshittification.

    • Re: it aint AI destroying the creative industries. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Friday February 07, 2025 @11:28PM (#65151313)
      Actually , it is destroying creative industries. When you use generative ai you impair your own creativity. People are lazy. Ai saves effort. It takes nearly no time before the operators just save the effort of doing the creative work , when the tool produces acceptable results.

      So that leads to 2 undesirable outcomes .. creators themselves lose skills and outputs tend towards homogenous , boring , average .

      You'll have to take my word for it but a recent study from U of T says just that. It's my previous posts.
      • Actually , it is enhancing creative industries. When you use generative ai you can enhance your own creativity. People are never truly lazy. That is ableist nonsense. Ai saves effort. It takes nearly no time before the operators just save the effort of doing the boring work , when the tool produces great results, which can then be enhanced with human art.

        So that leads to 2 desirable outcomes .. creators themselves gain time to create and outputs tend towards amazing.

        You'll have to take my word for it
        • Yep, I'm an proud ableist. You should be jealous. I am able because I put in the work to learn and practice. 55 years of music study and practice leads to amazing places you'll never go with AI. When you use tools to think for you, you aren't *doing* it. So ... what are you doing? Losing your skills.

          Argue with the eggheads who measured it: https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-explores-impact-llms-human-creativity.html

          Here's an excerpt to pique your curiosity, if you have any left:
          note: coginitive decline and
      • Most generative AI outputs are seen by one human one time. Why would people pay to see my gen AI shit when they can make their own gen AI shit? My gen AI shit has meaning to me because it's about my boy and pet cat, I don't think anyone else would care. In that sense gen AI is not competing against artists, and has no commercial value.

  • dann right (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nothinginparticular ( 6181282 ) on Friday February 07, 2025 @07:02PM (#65151051)
    Richter is absolutely right. If the shoe were on the other foot and the big tech companies were finding their business eroded by AI they'd have lawyered up so fast, LLM and generative AI training would've been stopped dead years ago. As usual it all comes down to who has the money and power.
    • Lawyers are not the only solution. There is another solution. An AI company that doesn't know how to compete can go talk with a president of some large country, maybe promise some money or something, and demand the competitors products be outlawed.

      It's a bit far fetched but could happen!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by larryjoe ( 135075 )

      Richter is absolutely right. If the shoe were on the other foot and the big tech companies were finding their business eroded by AI they'd have lawyered up so fast, LLM and generative AI training would've been stopped dead years ago. As usual it all comes down to who has the money and power.

      This is correct. The US built their textile industry by stealing from Britain and their pharmaeutical industry (and others) by stealing patents from the Germans. The Chinese built (many industries) by stealing from the US and other countries. Cisco started out by stealing tech from Stanford. There are others, like Zuckerberg and Facebook.

      None of these countries or companies have been punished but instead have been rewarded and lauded. To the victor goes the spoils, and the greatest spoil of them all is

      • Slater did not "steal" British loom technology; he circumvented mercantilist export controls by exporting himself with the knowledge.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Didn't OpenAI start crying foul about DeepSeek because they used OpenAI's stuff in training DeepSeek?

  • Why? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Just give it back to them.

  • I understand how it sucks for artists to see their work used in ways that they didn't intend, but I don't think there is much we should be doing about it. If the West starts imposing fines or fees for AI training, all that means is the best AI products will start coming out of China. They don't give a rip about IP laws, and would love to see their competitors hamstrung.

  • Easy fix (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sixsixtysix ( 1110135 ) on Friday February 07, 2025 @07:44PM (#65151111)
    Roll back copyright right terms to their original lengths and sort out the little bit of infringement left over. Current lengths do nothing but steal from the public domain.

    • Given that political power is held by those needing campaign contributions and Hollywood is very generous.

      Any minute now you'll claim we live in a democracy...

    • I think AI may force this to happen. AI results are not copyrightable today, yet people will want to use it to create "human generated art". Aint' no way that 100 years will work for anyone.

      14 years may be arbitrary but has great precedent, since the Statute of Anne, British Copyright Act of 1709, 1710, US Copyright Act of 1790 "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right" (US Constitution, Article I 8.8)

    • Roll back copyright right terms to their original lengths and sort out the little bit of infringement left over. Current lengths do nothing but steal from the public domain.

      So what? Profits are more important than "Public Domain". Nobody is even giving lip service to the concept of Public Domain anymore as Public Domain stuff puts a limit on profits. Don't like it? Become profitable and give your shit away. That is the only way to get Public Domain back.

      In other words: Fuck you. You deserve NOTHING. If you want something, build it; however, be prepared to pay homage to the already wealthy for their generosity in ALLOWING you to do the profitable thing. Know Your Place.

  • Bullshit!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sarren1901 ( 5415506 ) on Friday February 07, 2025 @08:28PM (#65151145)

    "There are a couple of music AI models, and it's perfectly easy to make them generate a piece of music that sounds uncannily like me. That wouldn't be possible unless it had hoovered up my stuff without asking me and without paying for it.

    This part is about where I had to stop. If I hear your song on the radio and like the way it sounds, I can go and fiddle around with my guitar and eventually create a similar sound and that's perfectly okay. Plenty of bands that came 5 years later sound a lot like other bands and that's okay.

    AI just does it faster but it's not doing anything that wasn't happening before. Creative people will still be creative. Besides, regarding music, the real money is in merchandise and live shows but mostly the merchandise. AI isn't doing either of those.

    • Strong agree. There are websites and repositories where independent *human* artists upload similar-sounding tracks with metadata like "In the style of ______". AudioSparx is one of them. You can license data from there, but it doesn't mean that the original (imitated) artist got compensated.

      • But some artist is getting paid. Richter is speaking for the entire industry here. He'll be fine, there's plenty of value in a filmmaker being able to advertise an original Richter score. But with everything replaced with AI lookalike and soundalike interpretations of what existed before, nobody's getting paid for doing their own work in which they put thought, effort, and individuality. As just one side effect, this means destroying the path for people who would come up with new ideas that aren't just "sou

        • But some artist is getting paid.

          So what? It used to be that farriers and carriagemakers got paid and then we came up with the car and all the jobs associated with the autoindustry. Human computers used to get paid and they were replaced by all the jobs in the IT industry.

          I can understand that it sucks when your job becomes obsolete because of technology but nobody has a right to keep getting paid for a job just because that's how it used to be. Technology can be disruptive but ultimately it always generates more, albeit different, job

    • sooo.. if you are a painter I should be able to take photo's of your paintings and sell them as prints?
      I mean it isn't anything I could have done with some time dabbling with a paint brush. This is just faster.

  • "You're going to get a vanilla-ization of music culture"

    2025 and people are still making fun of Vanilla Ice :(
  • Dude in article says it. "Original sin". An admission of guilt. Interesting he used a religious metaphor.

    Without keeping track of contributors there is no way to compensate "creators".

  • Copyright =/= Authorship (Score:3)

    by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Friday February 07, 2025 @11:55PM (#65151331)

    For me it is not only a question of the right to copy.
    It is a question of authorship: about plagiarising.

    Shakespeare's works are all out of copyright a long time ago.
    But if you take Othello or Hamlet and publish it, claiming to have invented the characters and written it yourself, then that would still be plagiarising Shakespeare.

    Now the systems can also plagiarise photos, drawings and music, and to some extent video.
    If you are plagiarising a comic book artist's distinctive style, then you are still plagiarising that comic book artists's style. It does not matter how old those drawings are.

  • This content may violate our usage policies
  • If it is legal for my brain to do, it should be legal for an ai crawler to do. Information put on on the internet and not stored behind a paywall or otherwise password protected should be free to absorb and learn from and even later used as inspiration for creating unique works.

  • What nonsense (Score:3)

    by SuperDre ( 982372 ) on Saturday February 08, 2025 @06:08AM (#65151527) Homepage
    If you don't have your work paywalled, it is 'public domain' for anyone to learn from it, so why should AI not also be able to learn from it. Especially when it comes to artistic content, it's not like those 'artists' didn't copy/learn from others, which is exactly why music sounds so much like each other these days. Don't blame AI for being able to learn much faster as regular humans do. They are just afraid AI does it better as they do. In the end, thanx to AI we can even listen to new songs by known artists from their better periods if we ask AI to create them, like Bryan Adams or Alice Cooper end 80's, begin 90's.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      If you don't have your work paywalled, it is 'public domain'

      So if a band, say, has a song played on the radio, it's now public domain? I don't think so.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      Public domain has a very specific legal definition.
      • I didn't mean it in the legal way, I meant it in the way that humans can learn, be inspired by it for free, so why shouldn't AI also be able to use the same thing. Don't underestimate how people copy content created by others, most of the creators now bitching have copied everything the know and done from earlier creators.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

          most of the creators now bitching have copied everything the know and done from earlier creators.

          If you directly copy from others or create derivative works, you are liable to be sued. If you are inspired by, that's different. You might want to chose your words more carefully. But even then, just because the process appears similar between AI and humans, we accord different rights to humans and machines in general, so without legal precedence it doesn't follow that just because a human can legally do something that an AU can, even if the processes are outwardly or even in detail the same.

    • Bryan Adams? With all due respect, eat shit and die.
      • I'm just giving examples of artists I like which I think have a period of much better music as their later works. A lot of times it's due to working with a specific producer of the time.

  • AI still hasn't become good enough to actually make anything original and convincing. I don't appreciate music made by AI and "musicians" using it quickly get removed from my playlist. I want something original of which I got the impression the maker put some actual effort in it.

  • To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

    —United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8

    14 years
    - Statute of Anne, British Copyright Act of 1709
    - 1710, US Copyright Act of 1790

  • Wasn't there a criminal case where someone was sent to prison for "illegally" scraping a website of their information? And if I remember correctly he was sent to prison for a VERY long time.
    Why are these AI companies now allowed to do the same thing?

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