Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, More Call For AI To Respect Artists’ Rights
Hundreds of musicians have banded together to fight against the impending use of AI to respect artists rights. Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder, Pearl Jam, Kacey Musgraves, Ja Rule, Jon Bon Jovi, and more than 250 other artists have joined with the Artist Rights Alliance to issue an open letter calling on “AI developers, technology companies, platforms, and digital music services to cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”
Who Is Asking AI to Repsect Artists Rights?
The letter highlights AI has been used without permission to train and produce AI models. The AI-created “sounds” and “images” are what “substantially dilute” royalty obligations to artists. “Unchecked, AI will set in motion a race to the bottom that will degrade the value of our work and prevent us from being fairly compensated for it,” the letter continues. “This assault on human creativity must be stopped. We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem.”
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Concluding the open letter, the Artists Rights Alliance calls on all AI developers, technology companies, platforms, and digital music services to pledge that they “will not develop or deploy AI music-generation technology, content or tools that undermine or replace the human artistry of songwriters and artists or deny us fair compensation for our work.”
AI Doesn’t Respect Artists’ Rights
For example, Bad Bunny heard a song back in November that went viral on TikTok, which was made using AI to copy his voice. The AI song called “nostalgIA” was created by FlowGPT, an AI tool that functions similarly to ChatGPT, and the track was uploaded under the username @flowgptmusic on YouTube and TikTok. The song also featured AI vocals from Justin Bieber singing in Spanish and Daddy Yankee rapping towards the end of the nearly four-minute-long song.
The Puerto Rican artist slammed fans who supported and shared the viral track. He wrote on WhatsApp at the time: “If you like that s—ty song that’s viral on TikTok, get out of this group right now. I don’t want them on the tour either.” In the post to his 19 million followers, he added: “You don’t deserve to be my friends and that’s why I made the new album, to get rid of people like that. So choo-choo out.”
“Working musicians are already struggling to make ends meet in the streaming world, and now they have the added burden of trying to compete with a deluge of AI-generated noise,” explains Jen Jacobsen, Executive Director of the ARA. “The unethical use of generative AI to replace human artists will devalue the entire music ecosystem—for artists and fans alike.”
