The term "generative AI music" is a bit of a misnomer, since AI doesn't actually generate any music. Instead, these programs "train" themselves by scraping information from all the actual, human-created music that exists out in the world and spitting out some approximation of whatever sounds the prompters want. Plenty of times, these AI programs will straight-up plagiarize existing songs, as those Czech Olympic ice dancers learned when their AI-generated skating soundtrack ripped off the New Radicals. But now, Sony has developed a new tool that will theoretically identify that copyrighted music that's being ripped off in these AI-generated tracks.
Nikkei Asia reports that Sony has unveiled a new tool which will supposedly analyze with musicians' songs were used in learning and generating AI music, figuring out, for instance, that an AI track has "30% of the music used by the Beatles and 10% by Queen." This can apparently be done with or without the cooperation of AI developers, either by digging into the developers' base model systems or by comparing the AI tracks to all the existing music out there.
Sony claims that this will help the original songwriters and copyright holders get royalties when their work is regurgitated in AI form. The tool can reportedly also be applied to AI videos, games, and characters. Sony hasn't decided how it'll be implemented yet, but they're hoping that AI developers can incorporate it into their models when negotiating with copyright holders.
The tool was developed by Sony's own AI team, which makes me trust it a little bit less. We've got bots watching bots out here. I can see this being a positive step, but it still feels shitty.
And speaking of shitty! A couple of Japanese pop stars are not too impressed at the toilet paper that's being used to stock the Sony Music bathrooms, presumably at the company's headquarters in Tokyo. As Electric Boom reports, two different Sony Music artists have posted some surprisingly graphic complaints about the toilet paper situation over there.
A couple of days ago, Ayase, the production half of the hugely successful J-pop duo Yoasobi, tweeted this in Japanese: "Sony Music's head office toilet paper is so hard it split my anus eight ways."
I interviewd Yoasobi at Primavera last year. Those young people work extremely hard! They had to use a translator to answer my dumb questions, and the group members were getting their makeup done for the Stereogum cameras while their backing-band guys were having fun in the pool that was set up back there. Maybe Ayase just shouldn't be taking dumps at his label office, but he deserves soft but durable toilet paper, and I deserve to not know the status of his anus!
Ayase isn't the only one complaining. His labelmate Masafumi Gotoh, frontman of the long-running alt-rock band Asian Kung-Fu Generation, quote-tweeted Ayase's complaint and added, "Sony Music's toilet paper is like sandpaper — hard and thin like that single-ply stuff. I want it double-ply." I agree! I have never been to Japan, let alone to Sony Music's Tokyo headquarters, but they should definitely switch to double-ply, at the very least! Maybe even triple!
Look: If Sony Music can solve the thorny issue of settling copyright ownership for AI music, they can ensure that their pop stars, or for that matter their regular employees, don't have to deal with the situation where the toilet paper is too thin and your finger breaks through and you get dookie on your finger.
In other news, Scott's going to be like, "Tom volunteered to write this post." No I didn't.
