OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
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Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#2Lyrics produced some of the first AI slop I noticed after ChatGPT was launched in late 2022, even if the large models hadn’t been trained on them specifically. Overnight there were a bunch of different advertising-laden sites that clearly scraped Genius or other lyric websites, and then had GPT generate commentaries on what the lyrics supposedly mean, so that these would get picked up by search engines.
The result was mostly comical, the commentaries for vacuous pop music all sounded more or less the same: “‘Shake Your Booty’ by KC and the Sunshine Band expresses the importance of letting one’s hair down and letting loose. The song communicates to listeners how liberating it is to gyrate one’s posterior and dance.” Definitely one of the first signs that this new tech was not going to be good for the web.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#3It would be so hilarious if GEMA was actually useful for once and not a detriment to society and artists in general.
However of course OpenAI will ignore this and at worst nothing will change and at best they get a slap on the wrist and a fine and continue scraping.
You can’t take that stuff out of the models at this point anyway.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#4Member when music sites were suing YouTube for music videos, and now they are begging people to watch them there and YT view counts are a bragging topic?
Soon music industry will be begging OpenAI for exposure of their content, just like the media industry is begging Google for scraping.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#5Member when music sites were suing YouTube for music videos, and now they are begging people to watch them there and YT view counts are a bragging topic? Soon music industry will be begging OpenAI for exposure of their content, just like the media industry is begging Google for scraping.
Youtube pays the music owner. OpenAI can never pay as even with stealing content they still manage to loose 5 dollars for every dollar they make.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#6Member when music sites were suing YouTube for music videos, and now they are begging people to watch them there and YT view counts are a bragging topic? Soon music industry will be begging OpenAI for exposure of their content, just like the media industry is begging Google for scraping.
That's exactly the difference between using with or without license.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#7It would be so hilarious if GEMA was actually useful for once and not a detriment to society and artists in general. However of course OpenAI will ignore this and at worst nothing will change and at best they get a slap on the wrist and a fine and continue scraping. You can’t take that stuff out of the models at this point anyway.
I made a living from GEMA payments some while back, but dear lord, so much of how the institution does what it does feels so bad and zero-sum. Might just be that the world would be better off without it. It does something important for right holders for sure, but (and I understand, I am heavily back-seating here without offering a solution) there must be better ways to go about it.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#8Of course the models are not human, but if you consider this situation as if they are persons, then the question becomes: May a person read lyrics and tell it to someone when asked, and the court's ruling basically says no, this may not happen, which makes little sense.
I guess the main difference between the situation with language models and humans is one of scale.
I think the question should be viewed like this, if I as a corporation do the same thing but just with humans, would it be legal or not. Given a hypothetical of hiring a bunch of people, having them read a bunch of lyrics, and then having them answer questions about lyrics. If no law prohibits the hypothetical with people, then I don't see why it should be prohibited with language models, and if it is prohibited with people, then there should be no specific AI ruling needed.
All this being said, Europe is rapidly becoming even more irrelevant than it was, living of the largess of the US and China, it's like some uncontacted tribe ruling that satellites can't take areal photos of them. It's all good and well, just irrelevant. I guess Germany can always go the route of North Korea if they want.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#9With AI slop showing up everywhere, there’s a real danger that folks will just no longer be motivated to produce real original content.
With all major models not basically trained on nearly all available data, beyond the financial AI bubble about to burst there’s also a big content bubble that’s about exhausted as folks are just pumping out slop vs producing original creative human output. That may be the ultimate long term tragedy of the present AI hype cycle. Expect “made by a human” to soon be a tag associated with premium brands and customer experiences.
Re: OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules
#10Of course the models are not human, but if you consider this situation as if they are persons, then the question becomes: May a person read lyrics and tell it to someone when asked, and the court's ruling basically says no, this may not happen, which makes little sense. I guess the main difference between the situation with language models and humans is one of scale. I think the question should be viewed like this, i…
> May a person read lyrics and tell it to someone when asked, and the court's ruling basically says no, this may not happen, which makes little sense.
I think the difference here is that your example is what a search engine might do, whereas AI is taking the lyrics, using them to create new lyrics, and then passing them off as its own.