Author: Ed Newton-Rex, Hendrik Vincent Koops
Publisher: Medium
Publication Year: 2020
Summary: The following article discusses the ethical considerations behind using artificial intelligence (AI) to help create music. The author served as a judge for a song contest. In this contest, contestants utilized AI in some capacity in the creation of their songs. Ethics was not a major part of the contest, but the author posed 2 questions to contestants: How do you feel in terms of ownership and authorship of the song relative to the AI, and what are some ethical considerations that came up in the process? It is difficult to determine how to split credit for the song between the team who used AI to create the song, the engineer who created the AI, and the musicians whose work the AI was trained on. Many teams believed that the musicians who created the music that the AI was trained on deserve less credit than the AI engineer. There could also be issues in the future of AI producing successful music and reducing opportunities/profits for human artists.