© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Paul McCartney, the singer-songwriter star of Beatles fame, is worried that AI could be used to “rip off” artists and has urged the British government to protect creative industries in its upcoming copyright reforms.
“AI is a great thing, but it shouldn’t rip creative people off […] Make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them. As simple as that,” McCartney said in a BBC interview that aired on Sunday, January 26.
On protecting copyrights amid the generative AI boom, McCartney said, “You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it, and they don’t have anything to do with it and anyone who wants can just rip it off.”
“The truth is, the money’s going somewhere, you know, and it gets on the streaming platforms – somebody’s getting it, and it should be the person who created it. It shouldn’t just be some tech giant somewhere,” he added.
Musicians around the world are grappling with users harnessing AI to create deepfake versions of their work. These AI models are used to generate songs and music after being trained on popular works, without necessarily paying the creators and IP rights holders of the original content.
In 2023, the two surviving Beatles (McCartney and Ringo Starr) released a comeback song called Now and Then that was sung by the late John Lennon. McCartney reportedly created the song by using AI to “extricate” Lennon’s voice from an old demo cassette.
McCartney’s warning comes a month after the British government laid out a sweeping AI Action Plan that proposes reforms to its copyright regime in order to facilitate the training of AI models.
“The proposals include a mechanism for right holders to reserve their rights, enabling them to license and be paid for the use of their work in AI training. Alongside this, we propose an exception to support use at scale of a wide range of material by AI developers where rights have not been reserved,” the British government said.
“This approach would balance right holders’ ability to seek remuneration while providing a clear legal basis for AI training with copyright material, so that developers can train leading models in the UK while respecting the rights of right holders,” it added.
However, the UK government’s proposed ‘opt-out’ copyright regime has been criticised by creators, who argue that it puts the burden on them to prevent their works from becoming free AI training fodder.
