It's such an odd thing to be upset by, honestly. Like screaming into the void, "I want to be forgotten."
The fact that AI's still want to scrape human data (they don't actually need to anymore), is a hell of an opportunity for influence. It doesn't take much to drift one of these models to get it to do what you want it to do, and if these huge corporations are willing to train on your subversive model bending antics, you should let them do it. We'll only get more interesting models out of it.
I get it though. If you're replicating artists work, they should be paid for it. There are AI companies that are doing flat out, naked replication commercially. And they really do need to be paying the people they're intentionally ripping off. All of the music ai's at this point. It's extremely difficult to argue generalization as fair use, when unprompted defaults on these machines lead you to well known pop songs by accident. As in, next to impossible to justify.
Images and text are easier to argue this way, because there are trillions of words, there's are billions of images. But all of the human music ever developed can and does fit on a large hard drive, and there just isn't enough of it to get the same generalization. Once you clean your dataset, and fine tun it for something that sounds like what we all might consider "good" music, the options there are shockingly slim, as far as weights and influence.
Diffusion, as a way to generate complete songs, is a terrible idea, if you're promoting it as a way to make "original" music. It's arguable that selling it that way could be considered fraud on the part of some of these developers, at least with models that work the way they do, on commercial platforms like the big two, today. That could change in the future, and I hope it does.
The music industry (at least in this case), is not wrong to point it out. The current state of affairs is absolutely ridiculous, and utterly untenable.
Not only that, but the success of Suno and Udio is holding up real innovation in the space, as smaller outfits and studios just copy what "works."
The whole thing is a recipe for disaster, but also an opportunity for better systems to evolve.
Or it would be, if people weren't idiots.
So yeah man. Let the datasets be more transparent. Let the corpos pay royalties... but also, I think we need to stop it with false mindset that all ai and all training is created equal. The process matters. Who's doing what matters. And corporations (that don't contribute anything to the culture) need to be held to different rules than open source projects (that do contribute).
