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Michael Jackson parody rewritten by AI has been deleted by copyright owners

Can artificial intelligence infringe copyright? Obviously yes, judging from the experience of Georgia Tech researcher Mark Riedl.
In a personal project, parallel to his professional research, he developed an artificial intelligence called “Weird AI Yankovic”. Its name echoes Weird Al Yankovic, an American artist who has been producing parodies of songs since the 1980s, some of which have become very popular.

The goal of Weird AI Jankovic’s algorithms is the same in modern version: to have song lyrics rewrite by an artificial intelligence to parody them.
On May 15, Mark Riedl posted on Twitter a video of an instrumental version of Beat It, by Michael Jackson, accompanied by written lyrics, karaoke style. On July 14, he received a message from Twitter telling him that his video had been deleted following a complaint from rights holders; in this case the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry).

Fair use or copyright infringement?

“I am quite convinced that my videos are fair use”, explains Mark Riedl to Motherboard. Others of his AI-generated videos posted on Twitter haven’t been deleted., unlike his first.

“Weird AI Yankovic generates alternative lyrics that match the rhyming and syllable patterns of existing songs. These alternate lyrics can then be sung over the original melody, explains the researcher. The rhymes are chosen and two neural networks, GPT-2 and XLNET, are then used to generate each line, word by word ”.

The Georgia Tech researcher’s situation is unprecedented and raises questions about copyright when it is not infringed by a human. Can we modify a work for which we do not hold the rights for experimental research? The question is still being discussed between players in the musical and scientific world.

Finally, the irony also comes from the fact that it is certainly an algorithm that detected this copyright infringement devised by … another algorithm. Requests from rights holders are generally made automatically to the platforms and the latter withdraw the content almost automatically to avoid possible prosecution. When the algos take the reins, the result is not always what you expected.

Source : Motherboard

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