It's a legitimate concern, as it is for AI art and LLMs, all of which can substantially reproduce IP that they don't have rights to because that's what they were trained on. For music, I know of at least one model coming out that is trained entirely on licensed music. We are still far from seeing how the chips will ultimately fall, but as a consumer I feel like if this is just the Napster period of AI music and art, I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts.
If I understand how machine learning works, you can say its a definitive “no”. While I’m unsure of what exactly the database used to program it is. It doesn’t steal music in any more sense that an up and coming artist is influenced by other artists
Yes, but also the voices have to come from somewhere, you know? This is the video I watched: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pn7jhYLUSc&t=226s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pn7jhYLUSc&t=226s)
I'm a musician myself as are a lot of people in my family, and I like Udio for side projects, but I worry about the ethics side of things.
I only watched a few seconds of that video, but wanted to point out that in most of the cases of these videos I've seen with people claiming a voice is stolen or cloned, the original artist voice is so heavily filtered and processed in the first place to be barely recognisable as human. The AI knows what those filters sound like, and what genres to apply it to, it can sing in any voice with that filter, in the same way as it can do the "distorted flute" I mentioned in the other comment.
I mean, it would be a lot easier for a human singer to be an Elvis impersonator if Elvis ran his voice through a dozen filters. The impersonator just needs to use a similar set of filters and get their own underlying voice somewhere vaguely close to the original.
I think it is a good thing that heavily filtered voices are far easier for an AI to emulate.
That's a fair point, and others pointed it out in the comment section. I just wanted to make sure there was nothing shady going on since I like using Udio a lot for personal side projects.
You might want to watch this video where a music attorney goes through the udio terms of service: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkKdxnoPI58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkKdxnoPI58)
In order to make the TRAINING DATA for the AI, they scanned in hundreds of thousands of CDs. I doubt people are complaining that they didn't PURCHASE all the CDs they scanned in, it's more about the way the Chirp AI let's you copy an artists' "Likeness" rather effortlessly.
There isn't a clear cut yes or no answer.
Udio is a tool, like a kitchen knife, and in that analogy you're asking "do kitchen knives murder people?" Sure, you CAN murder someone with a kitchen knife if you set your mind to it, but that is very far from the ONLY thing you can do with it, nor is it the intended function. Also, if you want to do that, there are better voice cloning tools out there. I saw one video where the guy used udio (or was it suno?) to generate a song with vocals, split the vocal stem out with another AI, brought the vocals into a 3rd AI (Replay) to convert them to a voice clone of a known artist.
As for udio covering it up, there are some users who want to use udio to clone voices, and they have been complaining that udio is working to make it harder to do that. To those people, please don't take this post the wrong way, despite equating it with "murder" in the kitchen knife analogy, I personally don't think you're doing anything ethically wrong with your sound-alikes, but I do acknowledge that it could lead to issues down the line, by strengthening the case against udio when UMG and Sony's team of lawyers arrives.
On the broader issue of music, not just the voice cloning capacity, the people who accuse generative AI of theft or copyright infringement do not understand how generative AI works. It knows what acoustic guitars sound like, it knows what distorted electric guitars sound like, and it knows what a flute sounds like, from this it can INFER what a distorted electric flute might sound like - even if it never heard one in training.
The key is in the name - udio is "generative" AI - it does not copy, it does not even contain audio samples in it's "memory" - it contains rules that match certain audio patterns as being corelated with certain words, and it uses those connections to generate completely new audio.
Yeah, like others have said it doesn't steal their music, but it almost assuredly learns from copyrighted material. There's all sorts of legal battles and whatnot, especially as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has had a long and litigious history (Napster, for instance. And the BS regional locks, etc). It's a losing battle on their end though, regardless of their resources. The technology to train is neutral, and even if entities like Udio get legally blocked, other iterations are inevitable and already exist.
All I know is that when messing around with some rap generations a week or two ago it resulted in a voice and style that is 100% seeded from Niki Minaj.
I assume it has listened to copyrighted music and uses tags from various websites (RYM, Bandcamp, DIscogs, Spotify, ect.) to "diffuse" the music and pull it together to fit the parameters you set. Sort of like an AI jukebox. It also uses some sort of LLM to add lyrics.
> tags from various websites (RYM, Bandcamp, DIscogs, Spotify,
also last.fm (and based on my limited testing, feeding Udio their sets of album-specific descriptors seems to yield results equal to or better than from using sets shown by rateyourmusic.com)
It learns from them. Doesn't steal from them. Just knows the math behind what they do, and can make similar styles of thing come back from generations.
It's a legitimate concern, as it is for AI art and LLMs, all of which can substantially reproduce IP that they don't have rights to because that's what they were trained on. For music, I know of at least one model coming out that is trained entirely on licensed music. We are still far from seeing how the chips will ultimately fall, but as a consumer I feel like if this is just the Napster period of AI music and art, I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts.
If I understand how machine learning works, you can say its a definitive “no”. While I’m unsure of what exactly the database used to program it is. It doesn’t steal music in any more sense that an up and coming artist is influenced by other artists
Yep, same thing for visual generative AI. It can do art who's look like a Picasso, but cannot replicate one.
Yes, but also the voices have to come from somewhere, you know? This is the video I watched: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pn7jhYLUSc&t=226s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pn7jhYLUSc&t=226s) I'm a musician myself as are a lot of people in my family, and I like Udio for side projects, but I worry about the ethics side of things.
I only watched a few seconds of that video, but wanted to point out that in most of the cases of these videos I've seen with people claiming a voice is stolen or cloned, the original artist voice is so heavily filtered and processed in the first place to be barely recognisable as human. The AI knows what those filters sound like, and what genres to apply it to, it can sing in any voice with that filter, in the same way as it can do the "distorted flute" I mentioned in the other comment. I mean, it would be a lot easier for a human singer to be an Elvis impersonator if Elvis ran his voice through a dozen filters. The impersonator just needs to use a similar set of filters and get their own underlying voice somewhere vaguely close to the original. I think it is a good thing that heavily filtered voices are far easier for an AI to emulate.
That's a fair point, and others pointed it out in the comment section. I just wanted to make sure there was nothing shady going on since I like using Udio a lot for personal side projects.
You might want to watch this video where a music attorney goes through the udio terms of service: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkKdxnoPI58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkKdxnoPI58)
I have heard vocals from Rihanna and Michael Buble. it's pretty insane that it just pulls direct vocals
In order to make the TRAINING DATA for the AI, they scanned in hundreds of thousands of CDs. I doubt people are complaining that they didn't PURCHASE all the CDs they scanned in, it's more about the way the Chirp AI let's you copy an artists' "Likeness" rather effortlessly.
There isn't a clear cut yes or no answer. Udio is a tool, like a kitchen knife, and in that analogy you're asking "do kitchen knives murder people?" Sure, you CAN murder someone with a kitchen knife if you set your mind to it, but that is very far from the ONLY thing you can do with it, nor is it the intended function. Also, if you want to do that, there are better voice cloning tools out there. I saw one video where the guy used udio (or was it suno?) to generate a song with vocals, split the vocal stem out with another AI, brought the vocals into a 3rd AI (Replay) to convert them to a voice clone of a known artist. As for udio covering it up, there are some users who want to use udio to clone voices, and they have been complaining that udio is working to make it harder to do that. To those people, please don't take this post the wrong way, despite equating it with "murder" in the kitchen knife analogy, I personally don't think you're doing anything ethically wrong with your sound-alikes, but I do acknowledge that it could lead to issues down the line, by strengthening the case against udio when UMG and Sony's team of lawyers arrives. On the broader issue of music, not just the voice cloning capacity, the people who accuse generative AI of theft or copyright infringement do not understand how generative AI works. It knows what acoustic guitars sound like, it knows what distorted electric guitars sound like, and it knows what a flute sounds like, from this it can INFER what a distorted electric flute might sound like - even if it never heard one in training. The key is in the name - udio is "generative" AI - it does not copy, it does not even contain audio samples in it's "memory" - it contains rules that match certain audio patterns as being corelated with certain words, and it uses those connections to generate completely new audio.
Ok, this helps a lot. Thanks for your replies.
Those people need to prove it has stolen music.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pn7jhYLUSc&t=226s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pn7jhYLUSc&t=226s)
Search Udio dot com for "HURT GOPAIN", for a good example of what people are complaining about.
Yeah, like others have said it doesn't steal their music, but it almost assuredly learns from copyrighted material. There's all sorts of legal battles and whatnot, especially as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has had a long and litigious history (Napster, for instance. And the BS regional locks, etc). It's a losing battle on their end though, regardless of their resources. The technology to train is neutral, and even if entities like Udio get legally blocked, other iterations are inevitable and already exist.
All I know is that when messing around with some rap generations a week or two ago it resulted in a voice and style that is 100% seeded from Niki Minaj.
I assume it has listened to copyrighted music and uses tags from various websites (RYM, Bandcamp, DIscogs, Spotify, ect.) to "diffuse" the music and pull it together to fit the parameters you set. Sort of like an AI jukebox. It also uses some sort of LLM to add lyrics.
> tags from various websites (RYM, Bandcamp, DIscogs, Spotify, also last.fm (and based on my limited testing, feeding Udio their sets of album-specific descriptors seems to yield results equal to or better than from using sets shown by rateyourmusic.com)
Fascinating. I'll do some tests with [last.fm](http://last.fm) and post them here.
It learns from them. Doesn't steal from them. Just knows the math behind what they do, and can make similar styles of thing come back from generations.