AI Companies Can't Stop Stealing Music
I'm begging you to just pay artists
Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher, the internet’s favorite place for music and data. If you enjoy this newsletter, check out my book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music that I wrote as I spent years listening to every number one hit in history. Now, let’s talk about how AI companies continue to steal intellectual property.
AI Companies Can’t Stop Stealing Music
By Chris Dalla Riva
A few years ago, people noticed that if you asked the AI chatbot Claude for song lyrics, it would readily return them to you. This was a problem for the company behind Claude, Anthropic.
Nearly every popular song lyric you come across is copyrighted, meaning whoever wrote the words gets to choose if someone else can use those words and, if so, how they are compensated for that usage. To use the word “word” just once more: If you want to print some of the words from The Replacements’ “Color Me Impressed” in your book, you need to both get permission from and compensate songwriter Paul Westerberg.
Anthropic and many of their competitors, like OpenAI, were not doing this. To try to placate rightsholders, they stopped their respective chatbots from returning lyrics. Now, if you prompt Claude or ChatGPT for song lyrics, they will tell you that’s not allowed.
So, the problem has been solved, right? AI companies now respect copyright and compensate artists for the usage of their work? Not exactly.
