Isn’t it true that AI generated music holds no legal copyright?

In Canada (which I assume you were referring to, as you didn't specify a jurisdiction) this claim is currently in litigation, so there is no definitive answer as to whether AI generated music is copyrightable or not. The currently accepted definition of "originality" (as required by the Copyright Act) is that it must involve the claimed author's "skill and judgment". Whatever that may mean in the context of AI is currently left for the reader to decide.

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gonzalohm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why is that? And who draws the line? If I use a synthesizer to generate music, does that count as AI generated?

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Grombobulous 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was under the impression that the US copyright office/various judges already determined that anything created 100% by AI is not copyrightable.

A synthesizer is not AI.

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thewebguyd an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Minor correction, but in the US it's not anything that's 100% by AI, it's LLM output itself is not copyrightable. Human elements injected into LLM output are.

Raw LLM output lacks human authorship, and it was ruled cannot be registered for copyright protection. Raw LLM output is automatically public domain (which is also why its silly for Anthropic to be in such a tizzy about China using Claude's output, Claude's output is public domain).

Only the parts of a work that are human authored can be registered for copyright. If a work was created with AI assistance, the parts that were purely AI generated cannot be registered.

The US copyright office also ruled that prompt engineering does not count as human authorship.

So all those people using Suno to generate AI slop music and flooding the streaming services, their output is almost certainly public domain.

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gruez 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

>(which is also why its silly for Anthropic to be in such a tizzy about China using Claude's output, Claude's output is public domain).

I don't see how it's any more weird than reddit/stackoverflow/linkedin trying to clamp down on AI scrapers, even though they don't own the copyright to the UGC that they're preventing the bots from accessing.

	▲	thewebguyd 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The difference is in licensing. Those platforms are protecting (or rather, monetizing) a database of human authored assets which those humans have given them a license to exploit. Anthropic (and others) are trying to protect a stream of uncopyrightable, public-domain machine outputs.

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p-e-w 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nothing is “created 100% by AI” though, because AIs don’t create things without human instructions.

	▲	oasisbob 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		How much instruction do you need though? What if I prompt Claude to go prompt Suno? What if the same chain happens internally at Suno? Easy to imagine the human input being very dilute and a small part overall.
	▲	thewebguyd an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The US copyright office ruled that the instructions do not count. Prompt engineering does not constitute human authorship. Prompt is the command, but the machine determines the specific expressive elements of the output (according to the USCO). Raw LLM output is automatically public domain.
	▲	tgv 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The prompt is yours to copyright, the algorithm belongs to Google or Suno or whoever, but not the output. It is not your creation.

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otabdeveloper4 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

AI is not a tool, it is an oracle.

Furthermore, it is an oracle built on copyright infringement.

Do you understand the difference between "tool" and "oracle"?

	▲	mapontosevenths an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No. Explain.
	▲	giglamesh 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Tool was a kind of metal/funk band (or something like that) and Oracle is a database (management system) that somehow made a lot of money for a lot of consultants (and the oligarch owners) even though open source alternatives were far superior.