David Israelite
In 1994, at the dawn of the internet era, Rolling Stone asked Steve Jobs if he still had faith in technology. “It’s not a faith in technology,” he responded. “It’s faith in people.”
Today, at the dawn of the artificial intelligence era, we put our faith in people too.
It’s hard to think of an issue that has exploded onto the public scene with the furor of the debate over AI, which went from obscure technology journals to national morning shows practically overnight. This week, Congress is convening the first two of what will surely be many hearings on the issue, including one with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and another with musician, voice actor and SAG-AFTRA National Board member Dan Navarro.
As members of the global Human Artistry Campaign, made up of more than 100 organizations that represent a united, worldwide coalition of the creative arts, we welcome this open and active debate. It’s gratifying to see policymakers, industry, and our own creative community asking tough questions up front. It’s a lot easier to chart a course in advance than to play catch up from afterward.
We don’t have long to get this right, either. The internet is already awash in unlicensed and unethical “style” and “soundalike” tools that rip off the writing, voice, likeness and style of professional artists and songwriters without authorization or permission. Powerful new engines like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Jukebox, Google’s MusicLM and Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing have been trained on vast troves of musical compositions, lyrics, and sound recordings — as well as every other type of data and information available on the internet — without even the most basic transparency or disclosure, let alone consent from the creators whose work is being used. Songwriters, recording artists, and musicians today are literally being forced to compete against AI programs trained on copies of their own compositions and recordings.
RIAA Chairman/CEO Mitch Glazier
Othello Banaci
We strongly support AI that can be used to enhance art and stretch the potential of human creativity even further. Technology has always pushed art forward, and AI will be no different.
At the same time, however, human artistry must and will always remain at the core of genuine creation. The basis of creative expression is the sharing of lived experiences — an artist-to-audience/audience-to-artist connection that forms our culture and identity.
Without a rich supply of human-created works, there would be nothing on which to train AI in the first place. And if we don’t lay down a policy foundation now that respects, values and compensates the unique genius of human creators, we will end up in a cultural cul-de-sac, feeding AI-generated works back into the engines that produced them in a costly and ultimately empty race to the artistic bottom.
That policy foundation must start with the core value of consent. Use of copyrighted works to train or develop AI must be subject to free-market licensing and authorization from all rights holders. Creators and copyright owners must retain exclusive control over the ways their work is used. The moral invasion of AI engines that steal the core of a professional performer’s identity — the product of a lifetime’s hard work and dedication — without permission or pay cannot be tolerated.
David Israelite
Courtesy of NMPA
This will require AI developers to ensure copyrighted training inputs are approved and licensed, including those used by pre-trained AIs they employ. It means they need to keep thorough and transparent records of the creative works and likenesses used to train AI systems and how they were exploited. These obligations are nothing new, though — anyone who uses another creator’s work or a professional’s voice, image or likeness must already ensure they have the necessary rights and maintain the records to prove it.
Congress is right to bring in AI developers like Sam Altman to hear the technology community’s vision for the future of AI and explore the safeguards and guardrails the industry is relying on today. The issues around the rapid deployment of novel AI capabilities are numerous and profound: data privacy, deepfakes, bias and misinformation in training sets, job displacement and national security.
Creators will be watching and listening closely for concrete, meaningful commitments to the core principles of permission and fair market licensing that are necessary to sustain songwriters and recording artists and drive innovation.
We have already seen some of what AI can do. Now it falls to us to insist that it be done in ethical and lawful ways. Nothing short of our culture — and, over time, our very humanity — is at stake.
David Israelite is the President & CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association. NMPA is the trade association representing American music publishers and their songwriting partners.
Mitch Glazier is chairman/CEO of the RIAA, the trade organization that supports and promotes the creative and financial vitality of the major recorded-music companies.
The Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP) had its first meeting of 2023 on Feb. 2 and invited National Music Publishers’ Association President and CEO, David Israelite, to address the organization. In his wide-ranging presentation, Israelite discussed artificial intelligence, Twitter, “realistic” copyright royalty board reform, and Phonorecords III (the ruling which will set U.S. streaming mechanical rates for the period of 2018-2022), which he said will be resolved “any day now.”
“We are five years and 33 days late of knowing what our rates are and counting,” said Israelite of Phono III, which was intended to be resolved at the start of the period in 2018 but has drug on ever since. In 2018, the NMPA and the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) had won an increase in the headline rate that songwriters and publishers are paid, but the following year Google, Spotify, Amazon and Pandora all appealed the ruling, hoping to go back to a previous rate they had paid in the period before. This led to indecision at the Copyright Royalty Board until July 1, 2022, when the judges announced a long-awaited determination in the remand proceeding, favoring to uphold what headline rate publishers and songwriters had asked for in 2018 but also providing other concessions to the streaming services, but the announcement was not the end of the road for Phono III. A true final determination still has yet to be announced.
“This is the definition of a broken process,” Israelite told the crowd of independent publishers. “This is why our top legislative priority for this next Congress is going to be reforming the way that the CRB works.” A number of independent voices in the songwriting and publishing community have voiced differing opinions regarding how to reform the CRB, how rates should be set, and who should get a seat at the negotiating table, as evidenced in their comments to the board during the proceedings of Phono IV. “CRB reform will only happen if all the parties come together and agree on what to do,” Israelite said. “When I talk about CRB reform, I’m going to talk about it in terms of what is possible, not in terms of what is utopia. There’s a lot we would change if we could [but some of] that is not happening.”
“Instead, we’re focused on two things: First, this process should encourage settlements. The goal of this process is to avoid going to court and working thing out like we have. Second part is that if you have to go to trial, if the settlement fails, then that process should work. When we have to wait more than five years to know what our rates have been, it doesn’t work,” he said. He also requested more resources for the Copyright Royalty Board’s judges.
In Congress, Israelite noted that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who is the chair of the judiciary committee, does not have a history of dealing with music issues. So, he suggested, “We have to bring [the House] what is close to a finished product with consensus from the industry if there is any chance at passing CRB reform.”
Moving on to his “top legal focus” for the NMPA this year, Israelite called out Twitter for “hiding behind the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act].” He said, “Twitter is the last major social media company that does not license and pay songwriters.” Since December 2021, the NMPA has been tracking infringements on the platform and systematically sending Twitter takedown notices. Since then, Israelite noted the NMPA has found over 240,000 unique infringements on Twitter. If Twitter does not take appropriate action to take down infringing material and safeguard against future infringements, Israelite said, “they could lose their safe harbor. What does it mean to lose your safe harbor? It means we now can sue you for copyright infringement.”
He then pivoted to discuss artificial intelligence and how it might affect songwriters. There are two main categories of concerns for Israelite when considering AI: inputs and outputs. For inputs, he is concerned that copyright-protected songs could be used as training data, and for outputs, there is worry that AI generators could create derivative works or compete with human made music. “This threatens the entire music economy,” he said. “I think that is pretty clear.”
“We have absolutely no time or attention for a debate about whether this is good or bad about whether it can be stopped or not about whether the music industry likes this or doesn’t like this, that is irrelevant,” he said. “Go back over time over every new technological development, generally, we later figure out how to live with it and make it work for us. Let’s do it now on the front end. Let’s not wait 10 years, and then figure out what to do about this.”
He suggested there are a few ways to safeguard music publishing and songwriters from oncoming AI technology. First, he said the NMPA educates lawmakers about AI’s threats to the music business. “There will likely not be legislation on this for some time,” he explained. Israelite also noted that they will be watching the legal space as court cases resolve certain questions regarding AI, but admitted, “We are not in a position today to even think about bringing legal action against any of these technologies.”
“Market response, to me, is the one that is the most relevant,” he said, considering out loud potential scenarios for the publishers in the room, like, AI generated or assisted songs coming on to streaming services and drawing attention and royalties away from the publishers’ catalogs of human-made music. He also said that some AI could be used as a songwriting tool not too dissimilar to other music creation tools of the past. “We’re only just now beginning to scratch the surface,” he said of what this technology is capable of changing within the business.
“I don’t have many answers for you today, other than what I’m hoping is that as an industry, we approach these AI issues with the mindset of this is not necessarily bad. It doesn’t matter anyway, because we’re not going to control it,” he said. “Instead, what are the opportunities? And how do we engage with it in a productive way, so we don’t look back and say, ‘It took us 20 years to figure out how to deal with AI like we did with digital music’?”
-
Pages