‘We Can’t Fight Technology’: A Litigator and a Dealmaker on the Brave New World of AI Music Creation

Joe Gratz spoke with Law.com following his UCLA presentation “Is AI the End of Music—or a New Beginning?” He highlighted the potential of harnessing AI as a tool to advance “human expression” and unpack the tangle of novel copyright challenges that AI-generated music presents to the industry.

Joe's main assertion is that “AI music is not destroying human music.”

He also discusses the potential disruption within the music industry, "Copyright protects only human expression, so the extent to which AI music is going to be able to be a marketplace force may be limited," he said. "And AI outputs still present complicated copyright questions that courts are going to have to wrestle with, even if we have a consensus on some of the training and fair use questions, ultimately.”

In the interview, Joe further explored how AI music differs from past innovations. “This is a technology that isn't just a new mode of distributing existing music or a new mode of experiencing existing music,” he said. He likened the advent of AI music creation to the inventions of the “synthesizer,” “electric piano,” “sampler” or “turntable.”

“It's a technology that creates new music that people might want to listen to, or helps humans create new music that people might want to listen to."

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