Concerns among musicians about music-producing AI tool

NOS News•yesterday, 10:29 PM

Dutch artists express their concerns in the AD about the theft of all kinds of artistic elements such as melody, style and voice by tools such as Udio, apps that produce music based on artificial intelligence (AI).

Tools like Udio use existing music to train the algorithm to produce music. “‘Make a song in the style of Zoutelande van Bløf with a Maan vibe’, you can enter that and a song will come out,” says Pablo van de Poel, musician of rock band DeWolff.

“Music is my life and the fact that something like this can be taken away by AI worries me enormously. At the same time, we mainly play live and that will not disappear so quickly.”

Assistant professor Emilie Rademakers understands where artists’ fears come from. “The success of these types of programs lies mainly in their accessibility: you just have to enter a few keywords to create a tune.”

“Many artists can continue to do their work by occasionally doing a commercial job, such as making a jingle for commercials,” says Van de Poel. “With the advent of AI, that no longer happens.”

Band members of the Dawn Brothers are concerned about the rise of AI:

AI makes music within a minute and this band is quite concerned about that

Caspar de Kiefte of Kunstenbond, the union for cultural workers and artists, recognizes the picture sketched by Van de Poel. “Udio has only been around for a very short time. At the moment, artificial music is mainly used for background music in cafes and shops. But AI will make the sector a lot smaller, because it will become much more difficult to make a living as an artist. “

Transparency also plays a role, Rademakers indicates. “The apps claim to lawfully use protected music, but it is unknown which data sources they use and how they process the music.

According to BumaStemra, the organization that manages the copyrights of approximately 38,000 Dutch music makers, permission is required from the rights holder to use existing music. But the organization has not yet received any complaints about the tools.

Yet Rademakers does not expect that artistic work will simply be replaced by artificial music. “Joost Klein is appreciated because he brings together different sentiments in an innovative way. In doing so, he touches on what is going on in people’s minds. An app can never do that.”

The European AI Act is expected to be officially published in May, after which the rules will come into effect in phases. The law should lead to clearer rules regarding artificial intelligence.