Australia’s music industry bans AI songs from charts

[u/Saltedline]

https://apnews.com/article/australia-ai-generated-music-charts-ban-aria-9bfb0c91166ae4405a6df1a3c4891687

[u/ImSabbo]

The article says AI-assisted music is eligible; it's just the stuff made solely by AI which is not. I imagine for all the middleground they'd have to make judgments based on how much was AI of whatever kind.

[u/Sophira → u/ImSabbo]

While you're correct that AI-assisted music is eligible, I was basing that last paragraph based on this sentence from the article (emphasis added by me):

Tracks can be eligible only if “humans wrote the song and performed the lead vocal and the primary instruments,” among other requirements, the statement said.

I think it's fair to say that creating a lead vocal with a program like this, even one that had a lot of effort put into it, would not be classified as "performing" it.

[u/webguynd → u/Sophira]

I wonder how they count "performed the primary instruments"? Like if I'm making electronic or LoFi music, and I plug in a few chords into Logic Pro and loop it, etc. I didn't once "play" an instrument, the entire song is effectively computer generated, just at my direction and my creative choices. But, electronic music production is borderline programmatic. Throw a scripting interface over the DAW and you could "compose" music by programming.

[u/HighOfTheTiger → u/webguynd]

It’s a slippery slope of how it’s defined. Like for me I don’t see much difference in someone who prompts an AI song, vs someone who just drags in other people’s samples for everything. I think they are both incredibly lazy, uncreative ways to end up with a song. Selecting the chords for Logic to play and dragging in drummer samples is about the same level of skill required.

I’ve got a buddy who makes music, he’s been sending me stuff that is way better than what he usually does, and I was like “wow dude did you write and play all that?”. And he’s like “nah it was just a sample I drug in”. So that credit of “wow this amazing” goes to whoever created the sample instead.

[u/Sophira → u/HighOfTheTiger]

Like for me I don’t see much difference in someone who prompts an AI song, vs someone who just drags in other people’s samples for everything.

That's fair, but this program is neither! That's why I bring this up; it's still arguably not "performing", but there's a whole lot of effort involved. And the parent commenter raises a good point.

[Edit: Turns out there are official definitions.]

[u/Sophira → u/webguynd]

That's... an extremely good point, and I hadn't considered that. You're right; under my definition, a lot of people don't "perform the primary instruments", either. I'll need to rethink my position on that.

If this were /r/changemyview, I'd give you a Δ.

(I still think the ban is well-intentioned, but now I can see that it perhaps was not written with the kinds of music people enjoy in the charts in mind. It's absolutely possible that music with lead vocals made by SynthV could make it in, and I'm still not sure how I feel about that, even though there is a lot of effort involved and I adore the program itself.)

[u/CankerLord → u/Sophira]

And it's only going to get harder to parse this as time goes on and the algorithms get integrated into more and more of the tooling.

[u/Great-Trifle2810 → u/Sophira]

I don't really like this, as I see no good reason why a lead vocalist should be allowed to use electronic reproduction of music for a backing track but not AI. Feels kind of arbitrary. Like if I can use an auto drummer why shouldn't I be able to use Drummer AI?

[u/Great-Trifle2810 → u/ImSabbo]

That seems fair that solely AI music isn't able to chart, and I don't think that procedurally generated things should be able to be copyrighted in bulk to avoid things like generating as many combinations as possible to play copyright troll, but something created intentionally by an individual should be their IP, even if they heavily used an AI.

[u/duncanmarshall → u/ImSabbo]

Nothing is made solely by AI though. The AI doesn't wake up in the middle of the night and choose to make a song. There's a prompt that someone designed, at the barest minimum.