TDs and Senators need to do more to protect artists’ work against artificial intelligence (AI) companies who are profiting by theft of their intellectual property “on an industrial scale”, the lead singer of The Script said as artists gathered to raise awareness of the issue on Tuesday.
Danny O’Donoghue spent the day in Leinster House speaking to politicians, addressing the Oireachtas Committee on Arts and doing media interviews to highlight a practice that is “not a victimless crime”.
Speaking before debate on a Private Members’ motion by Sinn Féin arts spokesman Aengus Ó Snodaigh calling on the Government to introduce stronger copyright protections, the rock star said: “I’m just here to tell the story of 125 of my songs.”
His songs and 21 million others were “scraped by AI data centres” and used on their “data training sets”.
READ MORE
“We haven’t been compensated for that.” These companies use “a business model of selling €10.99 subscriptions. They’ve scraped all of our intellectual property and they’re using that.”
The Dubliner said in each song “there can be anywhere from 25 to 30 to 50 people who are all earning revenue streams from that” including string players, writers, producers. “You’ve got bass players, guitar players, singers, and nobody really sees that.
“If I came in here and I took all the furniture out of the Dáil, straight away you’d see it’s all gone. Because it’s a song and it’s ones and zeros, it looks like you’ve a victimless crime. So we’re here to shine a light on it.”
O’Donoghue said a friend of his, Josh Gray, releases one song a week as he tries to make a name for himself. “He’s coming up against 80,000 generative AI tracks which are being uploaded every single day,” he said. “So he’s getting swamped under by all of this avalanche of fake music.”
The rock star was accompanied by former minister for the arts Catherine Martin, who runs the Irish arm of the Ivors Academy, one of three organisations backing the proposal, which also includes the Irish Music Rights Organisation (Imro) and the Screen Composers Guild of Ireland.
The musician and other artists later observed proceedings from the public gallery. Introducing the debate, Ó Snodaigh said “we are living through the greatest art heist in history. The entire corpus of global achievement in writing, music, film and the visual arts is up for grabs and it is being used for corporate greed.”
He said AI is flooding the world with texts, songs and videos on an unprecedented scale and it is described as “AI slop”. The Dublin South-Central TD asked, “How do we deal with this to ensure our artists don’t sink beneath the waves of the scale of the AI flood?”
His motion “calls on Ireland to lead the world as we did before in terms of the arts. Copyright was invented in Ireland,” he said.
The motion calls on the Government to introduce legislation to establish proper “licensing, transparency, fair remuneration, anti-impersonation personality rights, collective bargaining, civil liability and opt-outs required to protect the copyright of Irish artists”.
It also calls for Government to use its presidency of the EU to “lead efforts to resolve these issues”, along with representation for the arts sector on the AI Advisory Council.
Minister of State with responsibility for AI Niamh Smyth, who met O’Donoghue and other artists, insisted “Ireland is committed to ensuring that AI technologies are developed and used in a manner that is ethical, transparent, and aligned with national, EU, and international law”.
The concerns being raised by artists, musicians, writers, and other creators “are legitimate”, she said.
“AI offers many opportunities for creators” but they “must have confidence that their rights are respected, that their works are not used without appropriate safeguards, and that the innovation does not come at the expense of creativity”.
