Artificial intelligence continues to be a real concern for the songwriting community, so Nashville songwriters took to the nation’s capitol to speak on it.
In recent years, AI-generated music has become more and more commonplace, and creating it has become more and more accessible. Music created with artificial intelligence is already running rampant on social media platforms like TikTok, and as AI continues to advance, music made solely by machines is becoming harder to distinguish from songs made by real people.
A study shared last year stated that 97% of people can’t tell the difference between music made by real people and music made by artificial intelligence. Considering AI is still somewhat in its infant stages… that’s a huge problem.
And the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) recognizes that, which is why they visited Capitol Hill last week to meet with lawmakers. On behalf of all songwriters out there, representatives from the NSAI like Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Turnbow spoke directly to the higher-ups that could help stop AI… or at least slow it down.
WSMV 4 shared that Turnbow first informed lawmakers on how AI-powered songwriting currently works:
“Most of these AI tools will go through the internet and they scrape, which means they basically just gobble up any sort of content they can get from the internet, often from pirate sites. They take all that data and they break it all down into little micro bits so that they can then reformulate it into outputs based on how users are asking for that.”
Yeah… a prominent creator in TV (Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan) even called AI a “plagiarism machine.”
The technology is already affecting every media and art avenue you could think of. You probably heard about the AI-generated song that topped the Billboard Country Digital Songs Sales chart, right? Whiskey Riff reported that a track titled “Walk My Walk,” by an artist called Breaking Rust, had seemingly fooled the masses. It was a complete AI creation all around – from the artist, to the music video, to the song itself.
Songwriters like Jenn Schott told those in Washington D.C. that more and more AI song creations will continue to pop up, and ironically, a songwriter could be competing against a track created by artificial intelligence that stole from their original work:
“Once our creations are out in the world, being scraped by AI, learned, ingested, and then new songs being created with pieces of my song as a part of it. Then we’re competing against those songs and just trying to make a living.”
Though that sounds like a nightmare scenario, Schott did concede that some AI tools have helped speed up the process of pitching demos and, overall, has made much of songwriting more affordable. But those benefits aren’t enough to offset the negative impacts of AI across the board.
So the NSAI left lawmakers with a simple request that can be easily remembered as the “Four P’s.” Turnbow described the potential solutions as follows:
-Permission: “We think AI systems should have to get permission from copyright owners to train on their works.”
-Payment: “They should have to pay for that training, and they should have to negotiate that payment in the free marketplace,
-Proof: “They should have to keep track of what they’re training on so that we know what they’re using, not just scrape the internet and claim they don’t know where it came from or what they have.”
-Penalties: “We should be able to sue, in a cost-effective way, for copyright owners to have remuneration when they don’t do it right.”
Sounds simple enough to me.
At the root of it all, the Nashville Songwriters Association International is just helping to fight against the advancing technology that, at the time, seems to have a lack of guardrails all across the board. Without some guidance, the AI revolution could steer creativity and art off course. Hopefully the lawmakers take all that the NSAI had to say very seriously… and shoutout to them for fighting the good fight.
