Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Zayn Malik, and other artists sign letter against AI music generation

Over 200 artists, including globally acclaimed musicians Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, and Zayn Malik, signed the open letter against AI music generation.

Over 200 artists, including globally acclaimed musicians Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, and Zayn Malik, signed an open letter published by the Artist Rights Alliance on Tuesday that called on tech companies to “cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists”.

The letter expressed support for AI when used to benefit human creativity but claimed that tech companies were using the artists’ music without consent to train their models.

“We call on all AI developers, technology companies, platforms and digital music services to pledge that they will not develop or deploy AI music-generation technology, content or tools that undermine or replace the human artistry of songwriters and artists or deny us fair compensation for our work,” said the letter’s call to action section.

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It added that AI-generated sounds and images would also affect the royalties paid out to human artists, resulting in a “catastrophic” outcome for working musicians, artists, and songwriters with fewer resources and privileges.

Last month, OpenAI officials were reported to have set up meetings with Hollywood executives in order to exhibit the company’s newly released text-to-video model Sora, that is still under development.

The ChatGPT-maker is one of the companies facing a lawsuit in the U.S. over allegedly infringing the copyrights of artists and writers in order to create its AI models. Others hit with similar lawsuits include Google, Meta, and Microsoft.