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And Finally Artist News
Grimes adds a rule to her AI music offer: no Nazi anthems
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 25 April 2023
Grimes may have invited anyone who’s currently sitting on the generative AI bandwagon to “feel free to use my voice without penalty”, but that doesn’t mean there are no rules at all in this brave new AI world.
Although she likes the idea of “open sourcing all art and killing copyright”, the musician admitted yesterday that “we may do copyright takedowns … for really really toxic lyrics with Grimes’ voice”.
The recent surge in interest in using generative AI tools to create new tracks in the style of existing artists – by getting the AI to crunch data linked to the work of those existing artists – has raised concerns in certain parts of the music community.
The music industry maintains that training an AI in that way requires a licence from whoever owns the copyright in the existing music. Failure to do so constitutes copyright infringement, and labels and publishers may sue you, or at least urge streaming services to stop distributing music created by unlicensed data mining.
But Grimes declared at the weekend that people are more than welcome to train an AI with her back catalogue in order to create new tracks using a machine version of her voice, provided that they are willing to share any royalties those tracks might generate.
“I’ll split 50% royalties on any successful AI-generated song that uses my voice”, she tweeted. “Same deal as I would with any artist I collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings”.
Despite sticking by that commitment and announcing a plan to manage the royalty splits via smart contracts, Grimes did also return to Twitter with a few extra rules for what an AI Grimes can and cannot sing about.
“OK, hate this part, but we may do copyright takedowns ONLY for really really toxic lyrics with Grimes’ voice”, she said in a new tweet. “In my opinion you’d really have to push it for me to wanna take something down, but I guess please don’t be the worst. As in, try not to exit the current Overton window of lyrical content with regards to sex/violence. Like, no baby murder songs please”.
But “that’s the only rule”, she continued. “Really don’t like to do a rule but don’t wanna be responsible for a Nazi anthem unless it’s somehow in jest a la ‘Producers’ I guess. Would prefer avoiding political stuff but if it’s a small meme with your friends we probably won’t penalise that. Probably just if something is viral and anti-abortion or something like that”.
She later responded to a commentator who mused that, even if Grimes was to issue a copyright takedown against any Nazi anthem sung by an AI Grimes, once a track is on the internet, realistically it’s on the internet for good.
“We expect a certain amount of chaos”, she admitted. “Grimes is an art project, not a music project. The ultimate goal has always been to push boundaries rather than have a nice song. The point is to poke holes in the simulation and see what happens even if it’s a bad outcome for us”.
Of course, some would argue that copyright rules around music-making AI are much less clear than the music industry is claiming, and therefore there might not be a case under copyright to remove offensive content or even to demand half of any royalties.
However, given that Grimes is more than meeting the robots half way, you’d hope the makers of any AI Grimes music wouldn’t use her voice to test the actual legalities in this domain.
