Heart On My Sleeve
It was a state-of-the-art musical experiment-the result, however, was far from trivial.
The single went viral on digital platforms and particularly on Spotify, streamed about 629,439 times before its removal (at Spotify’s lowest royalty rate, the song earned about $1,888).
Heart on my sleeve is Drake and The Weekend’s song fed to artificial intelligence. The creator of the song, @ghostwriter, used AI to clone the voices of the two singers, which is why, Universal Music Group, called for its immediate removal from streaming services. According to Universal, the song would violate copyright law, eroding the production company’s “legal and ethical responsibility” to artists.
The truth is that the issue concerning copyright law and AI is a thorny and intricate one. Current legislation is inadequate to address deepfakes and especially potential problems in terms of intellectual property. Although there are regulations that protect certain rights to artists’ performances (such as making copies of recordings of specific performances), a deepfake entry that does not specifically copy a performance will most likely remain excluded from these same rights and may even be considered a protected work in its own right.
Surely the most disturbing aspect of this situation is the weakening of moral rights. The possibility that your style, your brand, your sound can be imitated by others is definitely a problem for one’s artistic identity and its protection.
After all, the use of AI seems to place no limits on the possibility of bringing to life work that we know is “the copy of a thousand summaries.”
The AI command prompt easily allows us to input the information we deem relevant to achieve the desired result, but perhaps we do not reflect enough on the provenance of this data: the graphics, texts, sounds, are works created by their respective authors, then absorbed, reworked and optimized by machine learning.
According to the Intellectual Property Law, the creator of a work has the exclusive right to publish it and enjoy its rights of economic exploitation; therefore, his or her permission is required for copying and reworking of such creative work.
It is also true, however, that copyright was never intended to restrict the use of ideas and information “extractable” from a work; this would mean that the use of copyright in the field of AI might even be contradictory to the purpose for which it was created, which is to foster the development of an environment in which creativity can flourish.
In the meantime, some of the most important tools available to users have moved ahead and in total legality, for example, Photoshop, which introduced Photoshop Firefly, based on generative AI.
To do this, however, Photoshop uses Beta, a melting pot of contents pulled from Adobe Stock (all of which is paid for).
An alternative (quite complex) could be to use the blockchain, and thus ensure that each creative is paid a fee for each passage of content from one “block to another.”
We are curious to find out what the future developments between AI and copyright will be; in the meantime, we urge all creative people to never stop questioning, because machines will evolve but will always have insurmountable limits. The human mind has no boundaries.
