With tracks created by artificial intelligence topping the charts here and overseas, New Zealand artists are concerned their work isn’t being protected.
The AI song Celebrate Me shot to the top of the iTunes charts in New Zealand, the US, the UK, France, and Canada three weeks ago after going viral on TikTok.
Credited to artist IngaRose, it was created on AI music software Suno and has over 7 million plays on Spotify.
Suno is an American generative AI software designed to create music from a simple text prompt.
Music rights management organisation APRA AMCOS New Zealand Division Head Anthony Healey said the software uses songs to train AI without artists' permission.
“What we’re seeing at the moment in music is AI platforms that have taken essentially every song that’s ever been written, they’ve scraped it, they’ve copied it, they've trained their machine,” he said.
He said New Zealand’s copyright laws were fit for purpose, yet it was still difficult for an individual artist to act against an international tech giant.
“We need the government to make it clear that they would take an artist's perspective, a creative’s perspective and stand by creatives when dealing with these sorts of infringements,” Anthony Healey said.
New Zealand singer-songwriter Bic Runga told 1News the rise of AI music risked losing our creativity.
“I do worry that if we outsource all our creative disciplines to a machine, our brains will just get a little bit dim,” she said.
She said software had no knowledge of the culture or history of the music it was using.
“Waiata, reo Māori and haka, you know, you don't want that all fed into a machine and then spat out,” she said.
Associate Professor at Massey University’s School of Music, Dave Carter, said the super power of AI was volume, impacting smaller artists.
“If the marketplace, which is already really swamped with new music, is suddenly flooded by this wave of AI-generated, really low-value, fast-turnaround content, it can be difficult for new artists to break through,” he said.
He said Suno’s objective was to “take the friction out of making music”.
“My experience of making music is it’s all about friction, and it's all about working with other people and the magic happens when you play music together and create something collectively,” he said.
1News prompted Suno to create a Kiwiana song about the Kiwi that "could be played on a summer's day".
In seconds, it generated two songs with melodies, lyrics and cover art.
Runga called on the Government to stand on the side of human creativity.
“Once those skill sets are lost, it’ll be hard to achieve them again,” she said.
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