The Crowd Misses The Data Train [304]

Hi Crowd! If your life intersects at all with any musicians you likely heard about this Atlantic piece about millions of songs used to train AI datasets for a number of generative music AI models. The immediate outrage of course is that this was done without the knowledge or permission of any of the musicians whose music was used. They even created a searchable database so you can enter any band or musician name and see exactly which songs were found in the training data. Important detail, this isn’t comprehensive: Finding your music in here means it was used for training, but not finding your music in here does not mean it wasn’t used for training. This just covers the datasets that were found and explored, there are certainly many others. I wrote a lot about training data and the ethics of using work without permission in part 3 of my recent series so I won’t repeat it here, suffice to say this is a real concern people have, and one that isn’t going away anytime soon. A quick scan…