The Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) announced yesterday that it has ex officio initiated preliminary investigation actions against the American company Open-AI, owner of ChatGPT, for a possible breach of data protection regulations data
In this way, Spain joins France and Germany, which are also investigating the use of personal information by this artificial intelligence. Italy, the United States and China have also announced their intention to legislate to avoid the risks involved in this new technology.
At the same time, last week the AEPD requested the European Data Protection Committee to include the ChatGPT service as a subject to discuss in its plenary meeting, since it considers that global treatments that may have a significant impact on people’s rights require harmonized and coordinated actions at the European level in application of the General Data Protection Regulation.
In this way, this committee decided – during the plenary held yesterday – “to create a working group to promote cooperation and exchange information on the actions carried out by the data protection authorities”, regarding ChatGPT.
In a statement, the AEPD explains that this agency “advocates for the development and implementation of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence with full respect for current legislation, as it considers that only from this point of starting point, a technological development compatible with people’s rights and freedoms can be carried out”.
Music generated with this technology has become a problem for the industry. Or so claims Universal Music Group (UMG), one of the world’s three most important record companies, which has urged music platforms such as Apple Music or Spotify to block the training of AI models, because they would be violating the rights of ‘author of the songs they use.
UMG considers that some artificial intelligence systems “could have been trained with protected content” without obtaining the necessary consents and without paying financial compensation to the creators of the aforementioned works.
“Much of the generative AI is trained on popular music. You could say: I want to compose a song with lyrics like Taylor Swift’s, the voice in the style of Bruno Mars and that resembles a Harry song. The result you get is due to the fact that the AI ​​has been trained with the intellectual property of these artists”, explains a source quoted by the Financial Times.
According to several emails to which the Financial Times has had access, Universal Music Group warns that it will not hesitate to “take measures” to protect the rights of its artists. For this reason, they urge streaming music platforms such as Apple Music or Spotify to block generative AI developers from accessing their music catalogs.
Nor do they rule out taking legal action against any company that does not respect artists’ copyrights.
In this sense, Google already has a service called MusicLM, which generates music from text. This model is trained with around 280,000 hours of music and which, at the moment, the company has not released due to a “risk of possible misappropriation of creative content”. The results are spectacular, say its developers: “Our experiments show that MusicLM surpasses previous systems both in terms of audio quality and adherence to text description. It can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text legendâ€.
Just enter a short description of what we want and the AI ​​will do the rest. For example, he has been able to create “a fusion of reggaeton and electronic dance music, with a spatial and otherworldly sound”.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and Dall-E, has also developed Jukebox, capable of generating music from scratch by simply entering a genre, artist and lyrics.
It is not the first time that artists show their concern about the possibilities of generative artificial intelligence. In January, a group of creators sued three companies dedicated to digital art (Stability AI, DeviantArt and Midjourney) for infringing copyright in the development of artistic works created by AI. Getty Images, one of the world’s largest agencies, also took legal action at the High Court in London against Stability AI, alleging that the company had infringed intellectual property rights, including the copyright in the content it represents.
