Celebrity deepfakes, impacting millions, have significantly influenced society.
Meanwhile, Sony Music has admitted battling AI’s intrusion into the industry, which reshapes record production and marketing for top stars but compromises authenticity and control over their image.
75,000 imitations of stars like Harry Styles were removed from the web manually by Sony – the third largest record label which will be associated with the negative light of singers targeted by these deepfakes.
The figure of ‘deepfaked’ stars in the public eye was submitted to a UK government inquiry on copyright rules which exposed the damage to the industry from AI. Sony says the search net of AI images appearing across the web is infinite and difficult to scour manually. Only a “fraction” are identified with multiple deepfakes of stars enabled by the accessibility to software.
The consequences can be extremely damaging to music and artist integrity and result in frauds, negative influencing and harmful advertising, which burdens the commercial opportunity for Sony. AI software is freely available now for fraudsters to dupe many victims into believing a false AI image.
AI-generated recordings in music streaming services are a major concern to “direct commercial harm to legitimate recording artists, including UK artists”.
UK copyright law must be robust to challenge fraudsters using AI software and protect artist’s integrity. Sony’s case is particularly striking as many of their signed artists have been subject to “digital replicas”, including Harry Styles, Queen and Beyonce.
The UK government wants to drive AI innovation for economic value and accelerate a lot of new AI businesses on British soil, whilst preventing exploitation with AI.
AI business founders will be enabled to scale and train AI models for free for commercial purposes.
However, copyright owners in creative industries will want to defend their own work and specifically opt-out of an ecosystem of AI models. Unions of performing artists, film makers, actors and artists have opposed the proposals and a culture of having to defend that one’s work is AI-free.
Sony said it was currently involved in “multiple negotiations” to license its intellectual property to AI companies. The proposals will allow AI developers to saturate creative fields without regulation and reduce a place for copyright and authenticity.
