An "innocent" AI cannot and does not have any of that. To say all a musician does to create new music is "listen to [existing] music" is reductive and ignores the inherently human expression that is music.
AI also doesn't have life experience to pull from.
Who does the music that AI creates belong to?
You would also only hear the songs you had discovered or had been introduced to, at the speed they were meant to be listened to. The music would also often be part of a scene that might include different underlying philosophies or associated fashion.
Your new music would be the outcome of all of those individual musical experiences, coupled with your creative and technical ability.
None of that is true for AI. It has just harvested everything without anyone’s permission and now makes artless slop from it for anyone who wants it 24/7.
It's very different.
Then please bear with me and extend the comparison just a tiny bit.
Replace the AI with an advanced species from Mars. Or even better yet an augmented human ... a trans-human if you will.
Both the martian have kids, families, feelings, etc... AND both can absorb the entire internet in , say , a week or two. They are musicians and create new music from their internet experience.
Does their music belong to them?
Do they have to pay rights to all the authors they listened to so far on the internet?
And finally ... what is the difference between my martian and a human today?
This article isn't even a discussion on AI copyright ownership. It's about training.
What if an evil robot race came along and begin draining your Martians of all their history, expressions, and entertainment. Would the Martians not be within their rights to go "hey, don't do that"?
Parent edited rather than responded:
Your "martians" already did pay for the rights to access the music (streaming services, cds, etc)! And if it's highly derivative they'll continue to have to pay (royalties). OpenAI/Meta/Anthropic did not pay, that's the inherent issue. They took when they should not have had the right to access, and trained against it.
The question is not the difference between your mythical Martians and humans, its difference between your Martians and AI. Your martians, like humans, have lived experience. They have emotions, fears, beliefs. They have family, children, loved ones. This all affects how they would express themselves. An "AI" has none of this.
Or, consider an analogy: how would you feel if some machine could use DNA from strands of hair to clone entire humans? Wouldn't it feel wrong?
But how are we going to have the trans-humans required to be able to keep humanity's existence after AGI takes control of the world!
Don't take this too seriously... ;)
Creation doesn't work that way. Music(ian) doesn't work that way. Your innocent AI lifeform doesn't exist. The technology does not experience in any way, let alone like a human does.
When you read the bitstream of an mp3 does it sound like the song you hear if you play it in Winamp?
If I were a musician, I could pull upon my life's experience of music to create new, unheard before, music in any style I chose.
My music would belong to me because I created it.
How is it different for an "innocent" AI who does exactly the same thing?