How to Look for Plagiarism in (AI) Music - Complete Guide

[@BenCaesar]

This is the kind of research we need. Thanks for doing this. 👏🏾

[@nourishedbymusic]

This is very interesting

[@michaelferentino8412]

Here’s the thing, so many pop songs use the same exact formula. Pretty much all blues very very similar formula. What makes this technology any different? Is it plagiarism? Or is it influence? I hate to break it to the world, but I’m pretty sure copyright and intellectual property law is going to change dramatically in the next decade. Perhaps sooner.

[@EyEyeArt]

I agree completely. Artistic expression has existed for centuries, millennia even, probably from the dawning of human civilization without the necessity of attributing proprietary rights to any of it. The music industry and copyright laws are modern constructs that, in the recent past, have proven to be unable to constrain any kind of artistic expression to proprietary laws and corporate interests. I remember the times when it was so hard to publish independent music, or discover independent music, since all the major record labels owned, and dominated the music broadcasting and marketing outlets. I would have to program the recording of music cassettes on my Pioneer stereo to manage to listen to those few nighttime radio stations that would broadcast alternative/indie bands. That obviously all changed recently with the advent of KZbin and current streaming services and corporate music had no choice but to loosen their stronghold since they understood there was no way they could stop people from share music online anyways. I'm not saying, let's get rid of a system that justly retributes artists for original songwriting. I understand that musicians livelihoods are at stake here. Nevertheless, considering the incredible possibilities for artistic discovery and experimentation that AI technology offers all of us, I don't see it succumbing to a group of artists or producers that are more interested in its financial repercussions rather than its artistic outcomes. intellectual Property laws are proven to be fundamentally flawed and will necessarily have to adapt to the everchanging music and arts scenes as they progress and evolve.

[@tonyr.4778]

​​@@EyEyeArt I think you will find that music generated with the use of AI will not be played on radio, tv or Spotify in the very near future. Since it is not copyright capable, it will be patched into by broadcast and streaming platforms at first, because they will see that they don't have to pay performing rights organizations, saving massive amounts of money. What happens next is massive boycott of these streaming platforms and broadcasters by all the major recording artists. That will create an opening for broadcasters/streamers who vow to not allow any AI generative music on their platform. So if you want to hear the new Taylor Swift album or any other artist, you will have to go to that non-AI platform. Other platforms will fall in line and either only have more and more variations of the same music used for trained AI or go to human based music. But.... I am amazed at what AI can do to simulate human qualities in music.

[@Toxicflu]

Thank you for being so thorough. I'm definitely checking my songs on these sites. For the moment, we can only copyright melody or lyrics, and your suggested websites checked for this well. The issue though: None of the sites actually checks for quality of singer's vocals. Udio often sounds like a known artist because the singer and style resembles its output. Our ears can recognize Emininem, Drake... and the other DeepFake singers, but these sites can't, and we still know something ain't right. But then again, how many other songs out there are folk male singer with acoustic guitar, so you're super safe. I'm curious what the law will become, and if singer's voice likeness will be copyright soon...

[@EyEyeArt]

@Toxicflu I think it's just a matter of time. It's probably the reason why Suno's voices sound so processed and artificial. They may still be trying to figure it out. Singers tend to all have a very similar way of singing within the same genre. Look at Grunge singers during the 90's or Heavy Metal singers. I think AI developers will eventually find a way to emulate a certain style of singing without sounding too similar to a specific artist. Udio is still in beta testing at the moment. If we look at the progress generative AI has made in image generation, in such short amount of time, I think we can still expect pretty surprising results from this kind of technology. Just for the record, I'm not happy about AI generated voices sounding like known singers or even the possibility of using a singer's voice without consent. Although, regarding the idea of a singer's voice likeness being copyrighted, if laws like that were ever to be implemented then bands like Greta Van Fleet couldn't exist and I'm not sure that would be fair either. I should have mentioned this in the video but I'm certain that our ears are probably one of the best plagiarism detectors we have and if a any part of a song sounds too familiar or too similar to some other song, then I wouldn't pursue it. In my AI song, I thought the general vibe during the piano solo sounded a lot like Norah Jones. But then again even traditional musicians aren't creating anything from scratch so, I think that any newly composed song has to have some level of familiarity and similarity to existing music. Actually that's probably part of its allure.

[@johndoe_1984]

Fun fact: the description under the video screams ChatGPT

[@NewMexicoCountrySongs]

I appreciate your video as well as your song. Good job

[@EyEyeArt]

@NewMexicoCountrySongs I'm glad you enjoyed the video. Thank you very much! I appreciate it greatly!

[@canaldetestes4517]

Hi, thank you very much for this video, copyright is a important thing, and in times of AI we really need to take care, so your work here is very useful and also very important.

[@EyEyeArt]

Thank you very much! I'm glad you appreciate the content!

[@rickard.eriksson]

Well, no, chords and tempo are not copyrighted. Melody is under copyright along with chords.

[@TheKanguru]

Thats F****** Stupid

[@voinea12]

at 22:00 It turned it into Will Wood

[@Alants8]

The fact that a song is similar to another one does not mean its plagiarism. There are almost identical chords progressions in many different songs.Good luck trying to copyright a chord progression.

[@EyEyeArt]

@Alants8 the purpose of the video is to check if any part of the song that was generated by Udio may have been copied from an existing, published song. It's just a record of myself exploring some current plagiarism detection technologies to avoid incurring copyright claims by making the song public on KZbin. I agree, and it’s understandable, that just the fact that two songs have the same or similar chord progressions doesn’t mean there’s a case for plagiarism although, in the past, lawsuits have been filed on those grounds. See the most recent Ed Sheeran’s vs. Marvin Gaye trial. I’m not sure what you mean by wanting to copyright the song or a particular chord progression but since this was generated by Udio I don’t own the rights to the song, I just want to be sure no one can come after me for using it without permission, in the case, any part of the song was mistakenly copied by the AI generator. For me this is part of a journey to discover what’s possible using AI technology. I’m really just having fun trying to see what I can come up with, although I'm also being careful not to infringe anyone’s intellectual property in the process.

[@BenCaesar]

@Alants8 No one is arguing that, the problem is training a model on copyrighted works without consent or compensation. It’s that simple. Good luck trying to copyright an udio output.

[@Toxicflu]

​@@BenCaesar Udio, like a camera is a tool. And photographers can copyright their pictures, even though they only pressed one button. Prompt composing is actually more than that. As of now, the part of the ai song that you edited afterwards, or changed can be copyrighted. But how much change needed is still in debate. Is just adding as little as a shaker, or a reverb enough???

[@Ainoyin19]

yeah. I don't own C major

[@djohawk]

Ice ice baby

[@MortenMaehre]

FYI, I uploaded a cover song (original by Springsteen) to check it for plagiarism. The closest match was some weird K-pop track. Although it's a good idea to check all your songs, not just AI generated ones, for potential infringement, this site is unfortunately not sufficient. Fingers crossed for better tools in the future!

[@EyEyeArt]

Yeah, I think you're right. As I mentioned in the video, the software is still in its beta version and doesn't seem to be very capable of detecting potential infringement at the moment but I thought it was worth mentioning since, in my opinion, it seems like it's got great potential.

[@MortenMaehre]

@@EyEyeArt Definitely, and I applaud the initiative. I just hope people don't rely on it too much.

[@Musicmanbutte]

Just found your channel, you should say welcome or welcome back to the channel.

[@EyEyeArt]

@Musicmanbutte thanks for pointing that out, although I do greet everyone at the beginning of all my videos, including this one, and welcome them (back) to the channel. You may have missed it probably because I like to keep the greetings very brief and get straight into the content.

[@SewerTapes]

Have you heard anything about organizations using AI to generate novel chord progressions, riffs, and other music components, for the purpose of copywriting a large swath of music that has yet to be written by musicians/composers? An article I read a while back was speculating there may come a day when an artist has to pay royalties when producing original music, just because a massive server farm working 24/7 for decades has already created a similar guitar lick. I wonder how much water it would hold though, on the grounds that the artist couldn't have heard that particular bit of copywritten unreleased music before.

[@Toxicflu]

There was a guy that made a software to create every midi note combination and sent all of them to a copyright office to claim every note combination. And they replied that the songs were not significant enough to be copyrightable. Thank god!

[@SewerTapes]

@@Toxicflu I hope that's what I'm thinking of and misremembering. Was it a few years ago? If so, that's probably it. And like you said, thank god. Nobody needs that sh!t. LOL.

[@Musicmanbutte]

Did you write the lyrics for the song? It kind of sounds like chatgtp did the lyrics.

[@EyEyeArt]

@Musicmanbutte no, I let Udio do everything for me

[@Musicmanbutte]

@@EyEyeArt I write all of my own lyrics. Here is one I just created tonight. It was written about my other that passed away Dec -19, 2017, she passed away 14 days after her 76th birthday. Here is the link if you want to listen to it. I hope you don't mind me posting a link to this song. I'm just posting it for you to hear. I am a paid member of Suno. kzbin.info/www/bejne/fmbLo2ylesZroqM

[@EyEyeArt]

@Musicmanbutte Thanks for sharing

[@BenCaesar]

Yes currently we can’t copyright chords, but likeness protection may be updated especially with the new deepfake technology. Let’s see where it lands

[@TheKanguru]

No one should be able to copyright something everyone can do . making a melody , what happens when melodic combinations run out and no1 can use any melody? F*** copyright.

[@germanher7528]

the problem I'm seeing on udio is the voices, I've found a few voices generated by udio that are obviously sampled from know singers, the voices are no just similar but exact copies, cause they are uncommon voices they are easy to be recognized

[@EyEyeArt]

Consider that this is the beta version of the website. I'm sure that as they refine their training and new versions of their AI model are rolled out, these issues will be dealt with as well. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with AI image generation but if you compare the very first versions of the Midjourney AI model to the most recent iterations, you can have an idea of the level of progress that can be made in such a short period of time.

[@wietzejohanneskrikke1910]

A thing to consider is that you probably can't copyright an a.i. generated song. There's already a legal precedent for this in visual a.i.: copyright can only be granted to humans. Since your song was completely a.i. generated, you are not the author of the work. On the other hand you could be liable for possible copyright infringement. Of course Udio distances itself from liability in the fine print. Not only that, but there's a strong suspicion that Suno and Udio both used copyrighted music to train their a.i. algorithms without permission.

[@EyEyeArt]

People that are experimenting with AI generated music and artwork don't seem to be all that interested in copyright anyway. If you really want to, you can still generally monetize the AI works without them being protected by intellectual property. The purpose of this video, wasn't to check for plagiarism because I wanted to copyright the tune myself. I just wanted to be sure I would be able to safely make it public here on KZbin, or anywhere else on the internet, without being struck by a copyright claim. I would like to clarify that when I refer to plagiarism it's in the traditional sense of publishing music that is a direct citation or copy of a previously published composition and passing it for one's own. There is no legislature, at the moment, to support the idea that training AI models with copyrighted music constitutes plagiarism. It's just speculation.

[@samthesomniator]

Is that illegal to train your software that way? 🤔

[@ParvathyKapoor]

Ai songs are 100 % trustable and wont fall under copyright i beleive

[@EyEyeArt]

@ParvathyKapoor like I said in the video, the AI has access to enormous datasets of original music during its training so I would guess there should be a way to align the model to avoid copying any music it was trained on ...at least you would think.

[@LynnColeMusic]

okay, but, my song sounds nothing like yours, and mipp gave me an almost identical list

[@EyEyeArt]

Hi, yeah, as I was saying in the video, MIPP is still in beta testing and I don't think the results it gives can be trusted completely, at least not yet. I do think, though, that it's worth keeping an eye on since it's the only app I found that actually gives such a detailed report on which songs and namely which parts of the songs are more likely to be subject to copyright infringement.

[@LynnColeMusic]

@@EyEyeArt Okay, so I took the time to look into it and take the pdf apart. We've got a couple of problems with this one. 1. The rules for what does and does not constitute plagiarism are absurd. If you have a 4/4/8 chorus, no matter what you do, you'll always get it flagged for plagiarism. Anything rock, country, blues or pop. Also, forget about power chords. 2. Timing, bpm, genre, lyrical content, and context are not taken into account, at all. And you could sidestep this simply by changing the key of your song. 3. It converts your song into midi, (badly, you can tell by the way the pdf renders. It'll show you sections of it) or tires to. And that's how it does the analysis. But, ai music like ai images always has noise in it, which breaks the midi parsing mechanism. The effect is that you end up getting notes that are out of key, and out of time, and that's part of why your ai music scores twice to three times as high as organic music, and causes either false positives or negatives 100% of the time. A tool like this is going to have a VERY limited useful use case. My hope is that this comment is helpful and contributes what I know to the conversation.

[@NEEDSHES]

Of course it is!

[@ellow8m]

So as every art is. Only God creates ex nihilo.

[@modestaalves3380]

Claro é consigo, muito bem

[@EyEyeArt]

Obrigado! Fico contente por apreciares o conteúdo.

[@wedontexist369]

Some songs I’ve generated are 100% direct copies of the voice of famous artists. Drake and Ice Cube etc.

[@EyEyeArt]

@wedontexist369 Udio is still in beta testing. I'm sure they'll figure it out. They seem to moving fast with all the new features they've added recently. I'm positive the next version of their AI model will be a big upgrade from the current one and they will have probably already addressed these issues by then.

[@mdog2435]

The tune is exceptionally generic. So, it might sound like many existing songs. Moon June Soon….etc

[@daveking3494]

It would be great if AI would completely destroy the pop music industry! But, serious composers will continue composing music on their own. Just like painters will continue painting in spite of AI.

[@j5545]

Chords are not copyrighted, chord voicings are not copyrighted, chord progressions are not copyrighted, music ensambles are not copyrighted, you cannot copyright melody since a giy made a machine algoruthom that creaged 1 billion melodies. Ai is the future copyright is dead

[@Toxicflu]

There are over 67 billion combinations of 8 notes at the same length within one octave. I think we have a while to run out of combinations.

[@j5545]

@@Toxicflu yeah I think he made more than a billion hr mad enough so any song u can think of is his and he copyrighted it all

[@samthesomniator]

​@@ToxicfluLuckily its enough to write those melodies down to actually be the copyright holder. And that is what his algorithm had done for all of the melodies of the natural notes. 😅

[@alexadigitalradio]

I find this conversation to be unnecessary. Why run all these checks when it’s my understanding that the developers are building this in. That’s one reason why you can get moderation errors. It’s very unlikely that anyone would even hear your song considering how many are being created by AI every day.

[@EyEyeArt]

I touched on this in the video as well. If you trust these music generators' built-in moderation (although the moderation errors normally just refer to citing an artist's name in the prompt from what I understand), then, of course, this is redundant. It was just a way for me to have some peace of mind since I wanted to publish this video on KZbin. By no means, though, would these methods be definitive in detecting plagiarism, anyway. As to getting the song heard, I would say it's equally hard to get any newly composed song heard whether it's AI generated or not.

[@wizards-themagicalconcert5048]

Funny part is : most nowadays produced songs failed the test, lol You can try it your self , try some classic songs or non ai songs ! Lots of copied stuff :)

[@rogerc7960]

Similar is not plagiarism

[@TeeCee-qq4ev]

You have to be kidding. A million jazz songs use the same riffs. A million Rock songs, the same beat and bass. Blue songs: every single one of the is B.B. King,You can't analyse nothing like that. A,I,. songs are 100 time less likely to plagerize or copy a song than an A person's mind. Google song recognition is enough.

[@EyEyeArt]

Hey, I understand where you're coming from and I agree to an extent, but have a look at this video if you think that scanning AI songs for copyright infringement is overkill: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fXyslX5_gb6ekLM

[@Esteban-pb4gw]

You cannot copyright something made by a machine/software as for now

[@EyEyeArt]

@Esteban-pb4gw you are correct, I agree. I have no intention of registering any AI generated song for copyright. I just wanted to check if any part of the song that was generated by Udio may have been copied from an existing, published song to avoid any possible copyright infringement claims since I'm making the song public on KZbin.

[@Esteban-pb4gw]

@@EyEyeArt well to me, at some point it is a copyright infringement from the minute Udio and others train their model from your songs, your voice, your style of writing. It's a big mess in this department really

[@EyEyeArt]

@Esteban-pb4gw at one point I'm sure it will become clearer to all of us. I guess we'll just have to ride it out and see what happens.

[@Toxicflu]

The part that you edited, or changed can be though. But how much is needed is still in debate. aka, is just adding a shaker, or a reverb enough???

[@paullatham9832]

The A.I. was trained on stolen music tho :(

[@calebmorgan6939]

woof. truely awful.