Variety welcomes responsible commentary, please direct inquiries to [email protected]. In early 2023, I warned that failing to robustly enforce copyright could result in an epidemic of “music laundering.” As the then-Chief Executive of U.K. Music, the collective voice of the British music sector, I was fighting for the interests of creators, record labels, venues and music companies alike.
Without proper guardrails, I argued, advances in artificial intelligence would enable technology companies to take people’s music without permission, use it to train their models, then generate clean, seemingly new content with its origins hidden. At the time, I worried that the comparison with mobsters laundering stolen goods might be too dramatic. However, three years on it is becoming increasingly clear that if anything, my warning wasn’t stark enough.
According to Deezer, half of all new uploads to streaming platforms are now AI generated and an extraordinary 85% of its fully AI-generated music streams are fraudulent. The music industry – and in particular artists and creators – are the ones paying the price. Whether it is music or money, there are three stages to laundering ill-gotten gains.
First comes the act of taking something illegitimately. Then it is cleaned and put through a series of processes or transactions, so no one can trace where it came from. Finally, it is integrated back into the legitimate economy and passed off as something that has been fairly acquired.
AI music appears to be increasingly following this pattern. First, in how music has been taken without permission. AI companies have persistently claimed that using copyrighted work as training data is perfectly legal.
However, that argument seems to be weakening by the day. As newly unredacted court filings from the New York Times’s copyright case again OpenAI and Microsoft show, it’s not just creatives who say their work has been stolen. Even people inside those companies recognize it as such.
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