“Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company, wants the streaming platforms to ban cloneworks as well as the data scrapers they use for training. UMG says it has “a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent the unauthorised use of their music”, which on principle is fair enough. But when what’s at stake is a future free of involuntary exposure to Jeff Buckley in Starbucks and Candi Staton in Aldi, the “commercial” argument is carrying a lot more weight than the “moral” one.
Background music may be the most benign application for AI.
-Bryce Elder”