Grimes, Universal, and Google: The debate over A.I. and copyright is rapidly evolving

It’s no surprise to see the techno-optimist considering the upside of digital immortality—her latest (and unfortunately far from finest) single is called “I Wanna Be Software,” after all. But many of Grimes’s fellow artists are still hung up on that first thought, about A.I. essentially making them redundant after training on their works.

When fellow Canadian Drake saw a fake song by A.I.-Drake go viral earlier this year, he wasn’t impressed, commenting: “This is the final straw A.I.” His label, Universal Music Group, had the track removed from streaming services by lodging copyright claims and talked about its artists’ rights being violated.

But now Universal seems set to embrace the trend. According to the Financial Times, the music-publishing juggernaut is in talks with Google about creating a tool that would let people use its artists’ voices or lyrics to make new, A.I.-generated tracks. Copyright holders would get paid (how much isn’t clear; Grimes takes a 50% cut of royalties generated by A.I.-Grimes songs), and artists wouldn’t be part of the scheme unless they opt in.

Google espoused quite a different approach in its response to an Australian government consultation on A.I. regulation. The Guardian reports that Google argued generative A.I. systems should be allowed to freely train on copyrighted content under a new fair use exception in Australia’s copyright law, and that “entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using A.I. systems” should be able to opt out of this happening.

This would apparently be a bit like online publishers using the robots.txt web standard to tell search engines such as Google not to crawl their sites. “We believe it’s time for the web and A.I. communities to explore additional machine-readable means for web publisher choice and control for emerging A.I. and research use cases,” Google said in a blog post last month—anyone wanting to join the discussion on that proposal can join the mailing list here.

I think the web-A.I. analogy has its limits. The mass indexing that was fundamental to the web’s development was all about sending people to the source—an obvious win for publishers, which is why I find the idea of Google or Meta paying publishers to send them traffic so daft. Google and Microsoft show citations in their Bard and Bing Chat responses, but that’s really just a fact-checking thing. To a far greater degree than with search results, people use chatbots to get a definitive answer rather than a springboard to somewhere else.

Asked by Wired’s Levy for her opinion on artists resisting their work being used as A.I. training fodder, Grimes replied: “We do need to change the legal and economic structure. But if you’re an artist, how could you not find it beautiful to be building the soul of an alien?”

Depends on who owns the “alien” and what the builders are getting in return. More news below.

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David Meyer

NEWSWORTHY

Amazon and Arm. Amazon is reportedly considering becoming an anchor investor in Arm, once the chip-design giant is spun out of current owner SoftBank in a planned IPO. According to Reuters, the Nasdaq flotation is set to take place in September. Reuters previously reported that Arm was also talking to Intel, Alphabet, and Nvidia about potential investments. Coincidentally, The Register reports that Amazon is running more than half the Arm-based server processors in current deployment.

X vs. climate group. Elon Musk’s X, which is suing the Center for Countering Digital Hate for allegedly trying to scare advertisers away from the former Twitter, has dragged the European Climate Foundation into the suit. As the Guardian reports, X is accusing the climate NGO of giving the CCDH its credentials to access X’s Brandwatch post-monitoring tool.

U.K. Electoral Commission hack. The U.K.’s Electoral Commission, which oversees elections in the country, has admitted falling victim to a very serious cyberattack that exposed millions of voters’ personal data. London’s Evening Standard reports that top intelligence figures see Russia as the prime suspect.

ON OUR FEED

“Substantial doubt exists about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

—WeWork knocks its share price by over 25% with a particular worrisome sentence in its Q2 financials. “The Company’s ability to continue as a going concern is contingent upon successful execution of management’s plan to improve liquidity and profitability over the next 12 months,” it continued. WeWork has never turned a quarterly profit.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

How to use Meta’s new LLaMa 2 generative A.I. tool as a chatbot, and how it compares to ChatGPT and Google Bard, by Stephen Pastis

Disney has a task force exploring ‘interesting opportunities’ in A.I., as writers and actors strike over concerns it could steal their jobs, by Paolo Confino 

Germany is copying Biden’s CHIPS Act with massive factory subsidies—and it’s paying off, by Prarthana Prakash

Creators say Meta is banning them from its creator-focused Facebook group for posting about diminished payouts, by Alexandra Sternlicht

Generative A.I.’s hallucination problem has companies contemplating if they want to ‘move fast and break things’ yet again, by Sage Lazzaro

A.I. can identify keystrokes by just the sound of your typing and steal information with 95% accuracy, new research shows, by Paige Hagy

BEFORE YOU GO

Tetris suit. Gizmodo’s editor-in-chief has sued Apple and the Tetris Company over their Tetris movie, which he claims is a rip-off of his 2016 book on the legendary Russian game, The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World.

According to a Reuters piece on the suit, Dan Ackerman says he sent the Tetris Company a copy of the book before it came out, only to later see it turned into a film without crediting him. He says the firm threatened to sue him if he made his own movie of it. Of course, we’re talking about historical facts here—except for embellishments like the movie’s car chase—so the suit is really about the similarities between how Ackerman and Apple told those facts.