Google created an AI that can generate music from text descriptions, but won’t release it

Yesterday, Google published a paper on a new AI model called MusicLM.

The model generates 24 kHz music from rich captions like "A fusion of reggaeton and electronic dance music, with a spacey, otherworldly sound. Induces the experience of being lost in space." pic.twitter.com/XPv0PEQbUh

— Product Hunt 😸 (@ProductHunt) January 27, 2023

Still, the Google researchers note the many ethical challenges posed by a system like MusicLM, including a tendency to incorporate copyrighted material from training data into the generated songs. During an experiment, they found that about 1% of the music the system generated was directly replicated from the songs on which it trained — a threshold apparently high enough to discourage them from releasing MusicLM in its current state.

“We acknowledge the risk of potential misappropriation of creative content associated to the use case,” the co-authors of the paper wrote. “We strongly emphasize the need for more future work in tackling these risks associated to music generation.”

Assuming MusicLM or a system like it is one day made available, it seems inevitable that major legal issues will come to the fore — even if the systems are positioned as tools to assist artists rather than replace them. They already have, albeit around simpler AI systems. In 2020, Jay-Z’s record label filed copyright strikes against a YouTube channel, Vocal Synthesis, for using AI to create Jay-Z covers of songs like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” After initially removing the videos, YouTube reinstated them, finding the takedown requests were “incomplete.” But deepfaked music still stands on murky legal ground.

"MusicLM: Generating Music from Text"https://t.co/XG1FyPNd4S

Impressed to see the quality of autogenerated vocals has gone way up! Sounds real but in a foreign language. pic.twitter.com/4U32ttoexI

— Jay Hack (@mathemagic1an) January 27, 2023

A whitepaper authored by Eric Sunray, now a legal intern at the Music Publishers Association, argues that AI music generators like MusicLM violate music copyright by creating “tapestries of coherent audio from the works they ingest in training, thereby infringing the United States Copyright Act’s reproduction right.” Following the release of Jukebox, critics have also questioned whether training AI models on copyrighted musical material constitutes fair use. Similar concerns have been raised around the training data used in image-, code- and text-generating AI systems, which is often scraped from the web without creators’ knowledge.

From a user perspective, Waxy’s Andy Baio speculates that music generated by an AI system would be considered a derivative work, in which case only the original elements would be protected by copyright. Of course, it’s unclear what might be considered “original” in such music; using this music commercially is to enter uncharted waters. It’s a simpler matter if generated music is used for purposes protected under fair use, like parody and commentary, but Baio expects that courts would have to make case-by-base judgments.

It might not be long before there’s some clarity on the matter. Several lawsuits making their way through the courts will likely have a bearing on music-generating AI, including one pertaining to the rights of artists whose work is used to train artificial intelligence systems without their knowledge or consent. But time will tell.