At present, few issues pervade the music conversation quite like the regulation of AI. With more music creation tools cropping up driven by artificial intelligence, many worry that the human creators of the source material on which they are trained aren’t being attributed and compensated fairly.
German-British composer and pianist Max Richter made his thoughts on the matter known earlier this week, when he gave a speech to MPs calling for greater protection for music creators.
Per Mixmag, Richter called recent proposals by the UK government that would allow AI companies to train their models on copyrighted material “unfair and unworkable,” putting “the onus on artists to opt-out”.
Richter started by asserting that he’s not “anti-AI”. “There are many areas of life, especially in scientific and technical fields, where it’s obvious there are huge benefits to the use of this technology,” he said. “When it comes to creative work however, the situation is more complex. We need to approach it with thoughtfulness and keep in mind the societal impacts that its use in creative fields could have.”
He went on to call music “one of the defining human characteristics”, and one that is “universal to all human cultures”.
“We have music for getting married, for celebrating a birthday, for learning the alphabet, for graduating school or university, for resisting oppression. From national anthems to lullabies, music is in any place in our lives that matters to us.
“A love song touches us because it was written by a person who knew what it means to fall in love; when we lose someone close to us, the funeral music touches us because its composer also felt the agony of grief, and this shaped the music they wrote; when a massive banger floods the dancefloor with joyful people, it is because the artist who made it knows what joy feels like.
“So, music gives a direct glimpse into how it feels to be another person. It connects us in profound ways and lifts us up collectively and personally.”
“Music is the closest thing humanity has to magic,” Richter explained, “But all of this will fade into history unless we support creators’ rights because, unless artists can be fairly rewarded for their work through copyright, there is no future for human creators.”
Richter called copyright “an acknowledgement that music has a value, both on a moral level and in monetary terms”.
“The tech companies pay their researchers and coders salaries. They pay for their buildings, their computers and server farms, but none of these mean a thing without access to good training data, so why is the government proposing that the tech companies should not pay for the training data too?”
