More than 200 artists feature on a new open letter submitted by the Artist Rights Alliance non-profit, calling on artificial intelligence tech companies, developers, platforms, digital music services and platforms to stop using AI "to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”
Amongst those names are Stevie Wonder, Robert Smith, Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, R.E.M., Peter Frampton, Jon Batiste, Katy Perry, Sheryl Crow, Smokey Robinson, and the estates of Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra.
The letter, while acknowledging the creative possibilities of new AI technology, addresses some of its threats to human artistry. Those include using preexisting work to train AI models - without permissions - in an attempt to replace artists and therefore “substantially dilute the royalty pools that are paid out to artists.”
We, members of the artist community and songwriters signed below, call on developers Al, technology companies, platforms, and digital music services to stop the use of artificial intelligence (AI)," the letter reads.
The artists believe that if used responsibly, AI has enormous potential to advance human creativity. But on the other hand, some platforms and developers hire Al to sabotage creativity and weaken artists, songwriters, musicians, and copyright holders.
Thus, if used irresponsibly, Al can pose a major threat to our ability to protect the privacy, identity, music and livelihood of artists.
Moreover, a number of large and well-known world companies without permission use these artists to train their Al model. For musicians, artists, and songwriters who only live from this job, of course this is a big disaster.
These efforts are directly aimed at replacing the work of human artists with "sounds" and "images" created by Al in large quantities that substantially reduce the amount of royalties paid to artists," he continued.
Because if it is not controlled, Al will trigger a race towards a low that will lower the work value of the artists and prevent them from getting fair compensation for the work.
We call on all developers, technology companies, platforms and digital music services Al to promise that they will not develop or implement Al's music-making tools that undermine or replace human art from songwriters and artists or refuse to compensate us fairly for that. our job, "the letter concluded.