The RIAA isn't opposed to AI as much as they're saying "join me, and together we can destroy indie music forever".
The RIAA is a cartel monopsony that demands songwriters and singers negotiate away all equity in their work as a condition of market entry. But there are alternative markets for music, and successful musicians that have navigated them. This is why, for example, mainstream music has been so strangely stagnant while the independent space is a lot more innovative. The labels don't pay good money for innovation; hell, they don't even want it. They want a sure hit saleable product every time.
As nerds, we're predisposed to look at generative AI through the framing of the Napster Wars. Except file sharing wasn't doing what generative AI does. P2P gave you a more or less faithful, if lossy, reproduction of a specific work. It might have missing or wrong metadata, but it was still clearly identifiable as that work. A generative AI system is instead producing legally distinct work - which is why all the AI training lawsuits are failing - using the creative input of the data the company scraped to train on. It infringes on the moral grounding of copyright but not the copyright itself.
The threat that generative AI systems pose to artists is twofold: spam and standardization. Generative AI makes it far easier to churn out samey-looking outputs, while losing utility as you try to get more interesting or innovative styles out of it. It's a slop machine. And, notably, these are exactly the sort of things the RIAA wants out of mainstream music:
- AI music is safe and approachable. If you ask it for jazz, you're getting a stereotype of the jazz genre.
- AI music can be mass-produced at scale without needing to advance an artist royalties. That means you can spam it on Spotify and destroy the discoverability of independent musicians.
- More importantly, generative AI turns the act of music production into ownable equity. The artist is cut out of the picture completely, there is not even the need to find a naive artist that will sign their life away in a 360 deal for peanuts.
The ideal world that the RIAA wants to live in is one where each label sues and then buys out an AI music company, and then has that company train a fully-owned "house model" on their back catalog only. No other entities will be allowed to train models, either through aggressive copyright litigation or through some new "AI safety law" that conveniently exempts them. They'll own the streaming sites and digital marketplaces, and any independent musician making real music will get crushed under the weight of AI slop.