An artificial intelligence company that is trying to recreate the voices of stars like Amy Winehouse and Drake faces the might of the British music industry in a historic battle over how artificial intelligence relates to the world’s biggest pop stars.
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which represents four of the UK’s largest record labels and hundreds of independent music companies, has sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI music startup Voicify, claiming that its use of copyrighted works it was illegal. The Times of London reported first.
Record labels fear that AI companies will use copyrighted music as training data for their models to create new works of art.
The BPI has sent a letter to Voicify, now known as Jammable, demanding it stop infringing copyright, accept the agency’s charges or face a lawsuit.
Jammable, founded by University of Southampton student Aditya Bansal, appears to have succumbed to that pressure.
According to a message on the group’s website, models offering listeners “deepfake” versions of Amy Winehouse and Drake have been removed from the platform.
A representative for Jammable did not immediately respond Of luck request for comment.
The music industry reacts
Battle lines are emerging in the music industry as creators brace for a fight over whether their content is used by sophisticated models to create new art forms.
Bansal’s platform seemed to particularly irk the industry, as the student boasted about the profitable returns he was seeing from the platform’s 3,000 deepfake voice models.
In May last year, Bansal told the Financial Times who made “a lot” of money from his platform, charging between £1.99 and £89.99 for different subscriptions.
“Music is precious to all of us, and the human artistry that creates it must be valued, protected and rewarded,” said Kiaron Whitehead, BPI general counsel. Fortune in a statement.
“But it is increasingly threatened by deepfake AI companies that appropriate copyrighted works without permission, building vast enterprises that enrich their founders and shareholders while stealing the talent and hard work of artists.”
The letter represents a significant escalation in tensions between AI companies and creators, with the music industry now coalescing around the technology following a wave of individual spats.
Gee Davy, COO of the Association of Independent Music, said: “The use of music without consent undermines the ability of artists to earn a living from their music and has no place in the creative collaboration between music and AI, and it seems that this was the case solution with Jammable.”
It’s the latest development in an industry that is trying to both curb the expansion of artificial intelligence and profit from it.
Universal Music Group (UMG), which represents artists including Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny, is in a legal battle with generative artificial intelligence company Anthropic, accusing it of distributing copyrighted lyrics through Claude 2, the group’s AI bot.
Record labels are simultaneously trying to figure out how to monetize the content itself.
Last August, the Financial Times reported that UMG was in talks with Google to license artists’ melodies and voices to create AI-generated music, citing four people familiar with the matter.
Artists are starting to get in on the action too. Musicians including John Legend, Sia and Charlie Puth partnered with YouTube last year to offer creators AI-generated versions of their voices to create new content.