Sony is locked in a battle against AI generated deepfake songs that copy some of its most famous artists, including Harry Styles and Beyoncé. The company says it has already identified and taken down more than 75,000 songs from online platforms that mimic its artists in fake songs. The company says the number is likely just a fraction of the AI deepfakes online.
The proliferation of deepfake songs has caused “direct commercial harm to legitimate recording artists, including UK artists,” the company said in a submission to the government there, which is considering new copyright laws that would enable training on artist material in AI models.
Generative AI, namely chatbots like ChatGPT, still produce a lot of errors and wholly made-up information. Image and audio generation models generally require less precision than producing text. A dog can vary a lot in its appearance, for instance, while ChatGPT should not tell a user that “1+1 = blueberry.” Proponents believe that AI generation of images and audio will help bring down production costs and that humans will always be necessary to create compelling story-lines and narratives. It could also end up with a lot more low-quality films as studios aim to make films on smaller budgets and making streaming more profitable.
There is an ongoing debate over whether consumers will notice the difference between AI generated songs, but the 2023 release of a song with AI-generated facsimiles of Drake and The Weeknd stoked fear that the public simply will not care. That is not great, of course, because the models are simply imitating works that have already been produced. While still in the hypothetical realm, one can imagine a world in which there are fewer real artists making real music that trains the models in the first place, and streaming services will be full of AI-generated slop tailored to the algorithm.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said he wants the country to be a leader in AI and has proposed allowing AI companies to train their models for free for commercial purposes on a range of content beyond just music. Many people today do not value content that much in a world where everything is paid for through a small monthly subscription or advertising. Companies like Sony would have to opt-out to be exempted under the proposal, something the company says would be burdensome.
Some artists have signed deals permitting their likenesses to be used in AI, but they appear to be the exception to the norm. In the UK, protests against the new proposals have been ongoing for weeks, with artists concerned that it would be too difficult to police for copyright violations under the rules.
The bigger concern with AI generation today is the production of nude deepfakes in which real people’s faces are superimposed onto naked bodies in a highly realistic manner. It has become a major problem in high schools across the U.S. Deepfake audio is only being used in phishing scams.
