Alexander Hurst , The Guardian; Eminem, AI and me: why artists need new laws in the digital age
"Song lyrics, my publisher informs me, are subject to notoriously strict copyright enforcement and the cost to buy the rights is often astronomical. Fat chance as well, then, of me quoting Eminem to talk about how Lose Yourself seeped into the psyche of a generation when he rapped: “You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow, this opportunity comes once in a lifetime.”
Oh would it be different if I were an AI company with a large language model (LLM), though. I could scrape from the complete discography of the National and Eminem, and the lyrics of every other song ever written. Then, when a user prompted something like, “write a rap in the style of Eminem about losing money, and draw inspiration from the National’s Bloodbuzz Ohio”, my word correlation program – with hundreds of millions of paying customers and a market capitalisation worth tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars – could answer:
“I still owe money to the money to the money I owe,
But I spit gold out my throat when I flow,
So go tell the bank they can take what they like
I already gave my soul to the mic.”
And that, according to rulings last month by the US courts, is somehow “fair use” and is perplexingly not copyright infringement at all, despite no royalties having been paid to anyone in the process."
