Do music publishers want to silence Anthropic’s AI?
After Meta Platforms and OpenAI, Anthropic, an Italian-American startup founded by Dario and Daniela Amodei, also ends up in court dragged by music publishers who want to see copyright protected
Universal Music, ABKCO and Concord Publishing have sued the Italian-American artificial intelligence super startup Anthropic, ordering it to appear in federal court in Tennessee on very heavy charges of having abused an "innumerable" quantity of songs protected by copyright to train his chatbot Claude.
MUSIC PUBLISHERS AGAINST ANTHROPIC
For the music publishers who brought the legal action, the software house founded by Dario and Daniela Amodei is in full growth (in recent weeks Anthropic has obtained 4 billion in financing from Amazon , as well as from Google and the former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried) would violate publishers' rights through the use of verses from at least 500 songs, from “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys and “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones to “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars and “Halo” by Beyoncé, digested by the artificial intelligence algorithms they are breeding.
In detail, the AI called Claude is accused of having copied a large number of texts taken from the Web without authorization in the training phase which requires the algorithms to feed on all human knowledge so as to respond in an increasingly complete manner to the requests of the users.
The publishers also allege that Claude illegally reproduces lyrics upon request, including “requests to write a song on a certain topic, to provide chord progressions for a certain musical composition, or to write poems or short stories in the style of a certain artist or author." Not only that, given that the actors claim that among the results of Claude 2 phrases appear extremely similar to the lyrics of the songs even when they are not asked to recreate verses and music.
According to plaintiffs' attorney Matt Oppenheim, "copyright law states that an entity may not reproduce, distribute, and display someone else's copyrighted work to build its own business unless it obtains permission from the rights holders". For this reason, the music publishers asked the court to rule on monetary compensation and on the issuance of an order to cease the alleged infringement by Anthropic.
SHOULD COPYRIGHT LAW BE AMENDED?
There are already several copyright holders who have cited software houses (the most striking cases concern Meta Platforms and OpenAI, supported by Microsoft), lashing out against the use of their works to train generative artificial intelligence systems. But this lawsuit that pits music publishers against Anthropic, in addition to being the first citation for the Amodei brothers' startup, from a jurisprudential point of view seems to be the first brought on the lyrics of the songs.
Detractors have started to talk about "emulatory AI", since, at least in the initial phase, artificial intelligences do not process but rework texts, music and works of art created by man by assembling various parts in an attempt to create something new.
Those who defend these new technologies, however, point out that just as all music comes from the same musical notes, the artistic world is also conceptually "finished" but new talents are tolerated to take inspiration from the works of the artists who preceded them. In the same way, in short, the rules protecting copyright should be broadened to allow generative AI to store as much data as possible.
What is certain is that if the courts began to prohibit generative AI from feeding on the material available on the Internet, it would become much more difficult for today's rising software houses to train the algorithms in development and almost certainly much more expensive.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia-on-demand/gli-editori-musicali-vogliono-silenziare-lia-di-anthropic/ on Fri, 20 Oct 2023 14:01:48 +0000.