A battle royal is brewing over copyright and AI

Consider two approaches in the music industry to artificial intelligence (AI). One is that of Giles Martin, son of Sir George Martin, producer of the Beatles. Last year, in order to remix the Fab Four’s 1966 album “Revolver”, he used AI to learn the sound of each band member’s instruments (eg, John Lennon’s guitar) from a mono master tape so that he could separate them and reverse engineer them into stereo. The result is glorious. The other approach is not bad either. It is the response of Nick Cave, a moody Australian singer-songwriter, when reviewing lyrics written in his style by ChatGPT, an AI tool developed by a startup called OpenAI. “This song sucks,” he wrote. “Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past.”

Mr Cave is unlikely to be impressed by the latest version of the algorithm behind ChatGPT, dubbed GPT-4, which OpenAI unveiled on March 14th. Mr Martin may find it useful. Michael Nash, chief digital officer at Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest label, cites their examples as evidence of both excitement and fear about the AI behind content-creating apps like ChatGPT (for text) or Stable Diffusion (for images). It could help the creative process. It could also destroy or usurp it. Yet for recorded music at large, the coming of the bots brings to mind a seismic event in its history: the rapid rise and fall of Napster, a platform for sharing mainly pirated songs at the turn of the millennium. Napster was ultimately brought down by copyright law. For aggressive bot providers accused of riding roughshod over intellectual property (IP), Mr Nash has a simple message that sounds, from a music-industry veteran of the Napster era, like a threat. “Don’t deploy in the market and beg for forgiveness. That’s the Napster approach.”