My social media feeds are overwhelmingly musician-focused, so your mileage may vary, but I’ve been seeing screenshots like the one above everywhere, accompanied by angry, angry words.
ICYMI, The Atlantic created an AI Watchdog search engine where you can check if your music was used to train AI models, for which you were almost certainly not informed or compensated.
In my case, 181 songs are in two datasets: LAION-DISCO (above) and SLEEPING-DISCO:
I should be really angry then, right?
Maybe I should be, but I’m like a 4 out of 10 tops.
For starters, I already knew my music was trained on. There’s a music AI service called Sonauto (now Treblo) that allowed you to prompt for specific artists until recently, most likely due to legal challenges.
When it first launched, I prompted for songs “in the precise sound and style of Color Theory” and the results were shockingly good. For free, mind you. Anyone could theoretically whip up a Color Theory album in a half hour.
I shared a track with my patrons and here are some sample comments:
Yeah I can’t tell BrAIan apart from you based just on a voice or lyrics, or the music style… Scary!
This is unreal, if you’d have posted this as your next demo I wouldn’t have thought twice 🙂 To be fair the vocals are good, but the song hasn’t quite got that Color Theory Magic.
Yes we‘re doomed….a bit. I still can hear a difference, luckily…But to be honest: if you wouldn‘t have told me/us before, I might have not noticed it….
My friend Minute Taker was in there too so I whipped up some songs with him singing ridiculous things he’d never say, for our ears only of course. If nothing else, AI is always good for a laugh!
Even then, I wasn’t angry. I was amazed! And a little bit honored to have made the cut, I suppose.
I’m not saying we don’t need protections for our sonic identities. We absolutely do, and maybe we’ll even get some retroactive compensation via a class action lawsuit. I’m not holding my breath.
Another possible reason I’m not angry (who can really say, emotions being what they are) is that a couple of years ago, I opted in to AI training through a sync/radio platform called AudioSparx. I’ve been active there for many years, and I figured if my music was going to be trained on anyway, I might as well get paid for it.
To be clear, this isn’t how my music ended up in those datasets. The AudioSparx training is fully licensed, as an ethical alternative to the theft detailed above. So far I’ve made $168.85 in AI training royalties.
To sum things up, I suppose I’m pro-AI, anti-theft. You know I’ll be asking Claude to proofread this post before I hit publish!
How do you feel about AI training on our music? Are you angry? Tell me why I should be too in the comments!
