{"id":42353,"date":"2025-09-04T04:54:17","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T04:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/42353\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T04:54:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T04:54:17","slug":"the-stealing-copyrighted-songs-to-train-ai-thing-is-way-worse-than-we-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/42353\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Stealing Copyrighted Songs to Train AI” Thing is Way Worse Than We Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

For two years, the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) has been compiling data pertaining to the theft of copyrighted songs. Huge tech companies are stealing intellectual property for the sake of training their Generative AI<\/a> programs. Recently, ICMP shared their findings with Billboard<\/a>. The results are staggering, worrying, and way worse than it initially seemed. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s been outrage for a long while about the way tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and X are scraping art, music, and writing to train their AI models. We\u2019ve seen it in the way ChatGPT can be tasked with writing a short story in the style of Stephen King, for example. Or a song in the style of Nick Cave. The results are shoddy and embarrassing, but the more pressing issue has been the blatant theft of intellectual property. <\/p>\n

ICMP has compiled substantial evidence over the past two years proving that these companies have stolen songs from big name artists. Among the names are The Beatles, Mariah Carey, The Weeknd, Beyonc\u00e9, Ed Sheeran, and Bob Dylan.<\/p>\n

According to ICMP, the evidence is \u201ccomprehensive and clear\u201d that companies are using stolen intellectual property to train their AI programs on a \u201cglobal and highly extensive scale.\u201d The use of this music has been unlicensed and for-profit. These companies are scalping millions of copyrighted songs without the barest hint of acknowledgement or guilt. <\/p>\n

Generative ai companies have been stealing art to train their programs on an unimaginable scale<\/p>\n

As Billboard reported, ICMP shared details from the investigation and included specific examples. Evidence came from public registries, leaked data, open-sourced AI training content, research papers, and independent studies from AI experts. <\/p>\n

For example, ICMP found that Meta\u2019s Llama 3 large language model pulled from copyrighted songs by popular artists. Research cited The Weeknd, Lorde, Bruno Mars, Childish Gambino, Imagine Dragons, Alicia Keys, Ed Sheeran, and Kanye West as examples. Several music publishers sued the AI corporation Anthropic for training its LLM, Claude, on lyrics from specific copyright-protected songs. The suit noted Don McLean\u2019s \u201cAmerican Pie,\u201d Lynyrd Skynyrd\u2019s \u201cSweet Home Alabama,\u201d and Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s \u201cHalo\u201d as examples. <\/p>\n

Furthermore, OpenAI admitted to training its Jukebox music making program on more than 1.2 million songs in 2020. More comprehensive investigation had them revealing the artists they stole from. <\/p>\n

The list goes on. Google\u2019s Gemini, AudioSet, and MusicLM, Microsoft\u2019s CoPilot, and AI research company Runway have all revealed involvement in this practice. ICMP reported that Grok, X\u2019s AI chatbot, is the worst offender. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the largest IP theft in human history. That\u2019s not hyperbole. We are seeing tens of millions of works being infringed daily,\u201d ICMP director general John Phelan told Billboard. \u201cWithin any one model training data set, you\u2019re often talking about tens of millions of musical works often gained from individual YouTube, Spotify and GitHub URLs, which are being collated in direct breach of the rights of music publishers and their songwriter partners.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The issue is more than theft\u2014it\u2019s a disruption of revenue and livelihood<\/p>\n

These tech companies are directly violating copyright and contract laws in order to train their AI models. Programs inundated into our daily lives without consent. They\u2019ve taken over apps, social media, the internet as a whole, even our cellular devices. They\u2019re disrupting job security, the environment, what it means to be human. Where does it end?<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not a victimless crime,\u201d said a spokesperson for Concord Music Publishing. \u201cThese AI tools are being used in ways that will displace lyric writers and undermine existing royalty streams. Although Large Language Model (LLM) lyrics may never have the creativity of a human, LLMs trained on human lyrics coupled with their speed, scale and economy, will undermine the incentive to create new art, which is the core mission of copyright law.\u201d<\/p>\n

What this investigation proves is that AI tech companies believe they are the future. However, it seems that particular future lacks a distinct moral compass. Ethically, creatively, and intellectually, there doesn\u2019t seem to be any benefit to further AI development. Still, ChatGPT can write you a song like Taylor Swift in under a minute. Why worry about the ethical implications? All of the reward with none of the hard work of using your brain or individual creativity. And isn\u2019t that a comforting thought.<\/p>\n

Photo by Andrey Rudakov\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For two years, the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) has been compiling data pertaining to the theft…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,20105,289,290,18,19,17,10321,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-42353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-music","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-noisey","16":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}