Is AI Going To Kill Real Music?

What do Elton John, Billie Eilish, Paul McCartney, Radiohead, Sting and Dua Lipa all have in common apart from great music? The answer is they have all objected to use of music for training AI large language models (LLMs).

Musicians are one of many types of content creators to complain about how AI LLMs are being trained on their content. LLMs typically ingest vast amounts of data from the internet. This gets sorted, processed (through something called Transformer Architecture), then fine tuned, so the AI tool can then create outputs. Musical content has to undergo additional processing into symbolic music representations to be understood by the Transformer Architecture. The concerns revolve around AI deepfakes, unauthorised vocal cloning, musical likenesses in AI-generated songs, personality rights abuses and most fundamentally loss of royalty opportunities.