Paul McCartney called on the British government to protect artists in the face of a new copyright law that could allow for AI to “rip off” creators. Speaking to the BBC, McCartney warned of the bill that would let tech firms train their AI models on copyrighted works — including music — unless the artists explicitly opted out.
Sir Paul McCartney has warned that AI could “rip off” artists if a proposed overhaul of copyright law goes ahead.
The proposals could remove the incentive for writers and artists and result in a “loss of creativity”, he told the BBC.
Sir Paul, one of the two surviving members of the Beatles, told the broadcaster: “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… Somebody’s getting paid, so why shouldn’t it be the guy who sat down and wrote Yesterday?”
“We ’ve got to be careful about it because it could just take over and we don’t want that to happen particularly for the young composers and writers [for] who, it may be the only way they[’re] gonna make a career. If AI wipes that out, that would be a very sad thing indeed.”
McCartney’s comments come amidst rising concern about the use of existing content to train AI models. Doing so is not only a questionable use of intellectual property owned by its creators, but something which also ultimately – by facilitating copies and clones to be automatically created – makes the process of humans making music (or writing words or making pictures) a pointless waste of time.
And while notable hold-outs include The New York Times, who have already taken legal action against AI heavyweights such as Open AI – the creators of Chat GPT – and Microsoft, their deep-pocketed backers, other vast repositories of human knowledge and creativity, such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation have already signed away the rights to use all their content to power up Open AI’s fake brains.
McCartney is backing the campaign to ensure that artists get paid a fair amount for use of their work.
Be under no illusion, there’s a war taking place with the ultimate prize being music itself, and who will own and create it all going forwards.
AI-powered music generation platforms Suno and Udio are already under fire from the RIAA, which has filed lawsuits against both, alleging "copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale".
Meanwhile, a group of 13,500 signatories that includes Thom Yorke and Björn Ulvaeus issued a joint statement demanding that AI companies cease training their models on copyrighted work.
That may sound like a contradiction given that Macca and team used AI to separate the vocal stems for last year’s Now and Then, but McCartney is clearly going after the practice of using AI to create original music, rather than audio processing or trickery.
Now and Then was rebuilt with audio software called Mal, which was able to lift John Lennon’s vocal cleanly from a piano part in order to be used alongside new performances from living Beatles McCartney and Ringo Star, alongside existing guitar parts on the demo, recorded by the departed George Harrison. (Musicradar)
