Fans are expressing their concerns after The Pokémon Company seemingly used fan-created music in a recent trailer for the Pokémon Scarlet & Violet DLC, The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero. The uproar began shortly after today’s Pokémon Presents wrapped up. While many tuned in for updates on things like Detective Pikachu Returns and the aforementioned add-on content, musician NightDefined (a.k.a. ND) noticed that some of the footage featured music they created. In many cases, it might be an honor for a fan to see their Pokemon fan music creation used by a company they admire, but for ND, it was also a surprise.
I work in music/licensing and this puts them in a very sticky situation. The laws around this are pretty set in stone. There will be a fair whack of cash changing hands I imagine.
Don’t worry, in a few years, they’ll just use an AI trained on copyrighted music to write an “original” score, declaring the training inputs to be “fair use” and the output to be “transformative”, and all those pesky concerns about licensing will go away.
As well as a fair whack of cash.
Isn’t this essentially what humans do, too? No music is created in a vacuum; it’s inspired by prior work. I guess the difference is that the AI won’t ask for royalties.
LLM AI isn’t creative enough to do anything more than straightforward copying. At best, it can copy two or more things at once and combine them, or apply a basic aesthetic/edit something to be visually “in the style of” a particular artist, sort of, kind of, not really. It can’t be do anything with the meaning or intent of a work, or “be inspired” to create anything markedly new.
Like. Regular old human plagiarists often claim to just be “inspired by” too, even if they just gave a story a new coat of paint and changed character names and reworded some sentences. That’s the level LLM’s are at.
LLM’s can be straight up directed to copy particular artist’s styles, too. Which it knows how to do (badly) because it scraped their works without permission or payment. People use midjourney like this all the time.
That’d be a great comparison if AI weren’t able to absorb and retain many, many orders of magnitude more information than humans can
That makes it even more transformative.