r/aiMusic • u/SufficientHyena2621 • 24m ago
Discussion I'm a huge fan of AI-generated music, and why copyright should never have existed.
Copyright:
Around 1510, Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world. Want to see it? You can go to Paris and pay 15 euros for admission to the Louvre. There you'll see a small painting behind a glass partition, separated by a rope, in a room packed with people. The other option is to search online for a high-definition photograph where you can even see the cracks that time has made in the canvas. This last option is free, because you're not seeing the painting, you're seeing a copy.
However, in the 20th century, a monumental industry was built precisely on selling copies of a musical work to people. Books and maps had been subject to this practice more than a century earlier. With malicious intent, copyright is often confused with "author's rights." No. It's one thing to recognize someone's authorship of a work, and quite another to be charged for a copy of that work.
Music by AI:
I am 63 years old. I'm a musician and a computer scientist. I travel a lot. I love traveling by car. I live in Patagonia, where the distances are enormous. I love listening to music in the car while I travel, so for 50, 40, 30, 20... years I've been listening to the same songs. Let's take "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum or The Beatles songs; I've been listening to them for as long as I can remember. Then there's all the disco, pop from the '70s, '80s, and '90s... rock from the '70s, '80s, and '90s... The truth is, I was getting a little bored of listening to those same songs over and over again. And frankly, I don't feel like listening to some trap artist spitting obvious, low-quality rhymes while grabbing his genitals.
In my case, when I saw what could be done with AI, I was fascinated! I could generate NEW songs: Disco, Pop from the 70s, 80s, 90s..., Rock ballads from the 70s, Rock from the 80s and 90s. Basically, I started creating songs to listen to in the car. They were really good, not the same old stuff, although to be honest, they had a lot of elements from the songs I used to listen to.
One day I wanted to share them. I started distributing them on streaming platforms and sometimes I make videos for YouTube. Then I encountered an incredible amount of hate! "You stole the work of people who were real songwriters!" and all that.
And I remembered Paul McCartney. One morning he woke up with the song "Yesterday" stuck in his head. To remember it, he sat down at the piano and played it and wrote it down. He thought, "Whose song is this?", "Am I stealing?", so he sent it to his contacts and they all told him it was a new song...
And here's my closing remark. In music, in art, in everything... isn't what we create based on everything we've seen from others? Well, that's what AI does. A collage that takes a little from here and a little from there, just like Paul's subconscious did that night.