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Billie Eilish at Glastonbury Festival: Female artists fear being replaced by AI
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Joel C Ryan / Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP
More than 200 artists have spoken out in an open letter against the abuse of artificial intelligence (AI) in the music industry. According to the Artist Rights Alliance (ARA), signatories to the letter published on Tuesday (local time) include Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder, Peter Frampton, Katy Perry, Smokey Robinson, Jon Bon Jovi, Pearl Jam and REM
Some platforms and developers are using AI to sabotage creativity and undermine artists, songwriters, musicians and rights holders, the ARA letter says. The US-based alliance advocates for the rights of songwriters and musicians. The protest is directed against services that can generate entire songs on text commands, which also imitate the style and voice of well-known artists.
Threat to identity and livelihood
“If AI is used irresponsibly, it poses an enormous threat to the protection of our privacy, our identity, our music and our livelihood,” the artists complain in the letter.
Some of the most powerful companies used the work of musicians to train AI models without permission. This aims to replace the work of human artists with huge amounts of AI-created “sounds” and “images”. This also affects the royalties of artists. For working musicians and songwriters just trying to make ends meet, this could be disastrous.
If used responsibly, AI has enormous potential to promote human creativity. However, if used irresponsibly, it diminishes the work of the artists and threatens their fair remuneration. The 200 Stars therefore call on AI developers, tech companies and digital music services to commit not to develop or use technology that undermines or replaces the art of musicians and songwriters.
tmk/dpa