Written by Anja Karadeliya
OTTAWA — On Nov. 1, Zania Mone made her first appearance on the Adult R&B Billboard chart. A week later, this song Walk My Walk Breaking Rust’s “Breaking Rust” topped Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart.
Both performers look and sound like humans, but they are not. Both are generated by artificial intelligence.
Monet was the first AI-generated artist to debut on Billboard’s Airplay chart.
For human artists, this is a major concern.
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Asked about the reaction to AI-created artists, Arun Chaturvedi, president of the Canadian Songwriters Association, said in an interview: “We’re seeing people getting more and more scared, angry and upset about what’s going on here.”
“In fact, 100,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day by human creators, and now these types of AI advances are rapidly increasing that number, making it even more difficult for artists to get noticed.”
Musicians aren’t the only ones worried. The House of Commons Heritage Committee will begin drafting a report on Monday, after completing its inquiry into AI and the creative sector earlier this month.
MPs on the committee heard from organizations and unions representing creative industries such as music, publishing, television and film production.
AI-generated content is only possible because AI systems ingest large amounts of existing content. Creative organizations are concerned about the unauthorized use of copyrighted works by AI and want to establish a licensing system for such uses.
An association representing Canadian publishers said even the prime minister is not immune to AI competition.
John Illingworth, executive director of the Canadian Publishers Association, told the committee that major distribution platforms are “inundated” with low-quality, AI-generated books.
“For example, if you search for “Mark Carney biography” on Amazon.ca, you’ll see a ton of purported biographies of our prime minister, many with AI-generated covers, some of which rank higher in search results than his biography. value” Illingworth said, referring to Carney’s book, which was published in 2021.
“The average consumer has no way of distinguishing between a well-researched book and disjointed nonsense until they purchase it,” he added.
AI is seen as a threat to artists’ livelihoods
Victoria Shen, executive director of the Writers Guild of Canada, told MPs that generative AI “has been trained on the work of artists and creators, and now it threatens their livelihoods.”
Tania Contoianni, president of the Union of Artists, said artists were now feeding a beast that threatened to devour them.
Wyatt Tessari-Larrier, founder and executive director of AI Governance and Safety Canada, said platforms like Spotify and Google are already full of AI content, and that’s just the beginning.
“Within a few years, when high-quality, customized AI content becomes available on-demand at a very low cost, we could easily create a situation where more than 90 per cent of what Canadians see on platforms is generated by AI,” he said.
Disney’s CEO hinted this week that the Disney+ streaming platform could allow users to generate their own content.
Creative industry bodies are not calling on governments to block AI competition. They want transparency from the government to allow AI companies to see when their work is being used, and hope this will help move towards a licensing system.
“Transparency in terms of the incorporation of works into system training is critical so artists know what is actually being used and what can be licensed,” Access Copyright general counsel Erin Finley told lawmakers.
“Without that information, artists are completely isolated. Do they need to get a license? Can they get a license? Is it being used? I don’t know.”
Lisa Broadfoot, vice-president of industry and business at the Media Producers Association of Canada, said the organization is “supporting the development of a vibrant licensing market where producers and other rights holders can freely negotiate the use of their intellectual property for AI training and other uses.”
The question of how copyright law deals with the use of copyrighted works for training AI is currently pending in courts in both Canada and the United States. Creative industry groups have called on lawmakers not to add new exceptions to copyright law that would benefit AI companies.
The question of whether to add new text and data mining exceptions to the law was one of the issues considered by the Department of Cultural Heritage in a consultation two years ago. The high-tech industry supports an exception that applies to the use of training materials.
Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, told the committee that if Canada makes it more difficult or expensive to develop AI technology, AI development will move overseas.
“It is therefore essential to ensure that our copyright framework is globally competitive,” he said.
“That’s why we need copyright law that remains balanced through effective fair dealing rules, and appropriate exceptions that position Canada to embrace AI opportunities, given the use of text mining and data mining exceptions in other regions, including the EU.”
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