Sony Music Warns Artificial Intelligence Companies: Don’t Harvest Our Data
Sony Music warned tech companies not to mine its recordings, compositions, lyrics and more “for any purposes, including in relation to training, developing, or commercializing any [artificial intelligence] system,” in a declaration published on the company’s website on Thursday (May 16).
In addition, according to a letter obtained by Billboard, Sony Music is in the process of reaching out to hundreds of companies developing generative AI tech, as well as streaming services, to drive home this message directly.
The pointed letter notes that “unauthorized use of SMG Content in the training, development or commercialization of AI systems deprives SMG Companies and SMG Talent of control over and appropriate compensation for the uses of SMG Content, conflicts with the normal exploitation of those works, unreasonably prejudices our legitimate interests, and infringes our intellectual property and other rights.” Trending on Billboard
GenAI models require “training” — “a computational process of deconstructing existing works for the purpose of modeling mathematically how [they] work,” as Google explained last year in comments to the U.S. Copyright Office in October. “By taking existing works apart, the algorithm develops a capacity to infer how new ones should be put together.” Through inference, these models eventually can generate credible-sounding hip-hop beats, for example.
