The music industry is fighting on platforms, through the courts and with legislators in a bid to prevent the theft and misuse of art from generative AI — but it remains an uphill battle.Sony Music said recently it has already demanded that 75,000 deepfakes — simulated images, tunes or videos that can easily be mistaken for real — be rooted out, a figure reflecting the magnitude of the issue.The information security company Pindrop says AI-generated music has “telltale signs” and is easy to detect, yet such music seems to be everywhere.”Even when it sounds realistic, AI-generated songs often have subtle irregularities in frequency variation, rhythm and digital patterns that aren’t present in human performances,” said Pindrop, which specializes in voice analysis.But it takes mere minutes on YouTube or Spotify — two top music-streaming platforms — to spot a fake rap from 2Pac about pizzas, or an Ariana Grande cover of a K-pop track that she never performed.”We take that really seriously, and we’re trying to work on new tools in that space to make that even better,” said Sam Duboff, Spotify’s lead on policy organization.YouTube said it is “refining” its own ability to spot AI dupes, and could announce results in the coming weeks.”The bad actors were a little bit more aware sooner,” leaving artists, labels and others in the music business “operating from a position of reactivity,” said Jeremy Goldman, an analyst at the company Emarketer.”YouTube, with a multiple of billions of dollars per year, has a strong vested interest to solve this,” Goldman said, adding that he trusts they’re working seriously to fix it.”You don’t want the platform itself, if you’re at YouTube, to devolve into, like, an AI nightmare,” he said.- Litigation -But beyond deepfakes, the music industry is particularly concerned about unauthorized use of its content to train generative AI models like Suno, Udio or Mubert.Several major labels filed a lawsuit last year at a federal court in New York against the parent company of Udio, accusing it of developing its technology with “copyrighted sound recordings for the ultimate purpose of poaching the listeners, fans and potential licensees of the sound recordings it copied.”More than nine months later, proceedings have yet to begin in earnest. The same is true for a similar case against Suno, filed in Massachusetts.At the center of the litigation is the principle of fair use, allowing limited use of some copyrighted material without advance permission. It could limit the application of intellectual property rights.”It’s an area of genuine uncertainty,” said Joseph Fishman, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. Any initial rulings won’t necessarily prove decisive, as varying opinions from different courts could punt the issue to the Supreme Court.In the meantime, the major players involved in AI-generated music continue to train their models on copyrighted work — raising the question of whether the battle isn’t already lost.Fishman said it may be too soon to say that: although many models are already training on protected material, new versions of those models are released continuously, and it’s unclear whether any court decisions would create licensing issues for those models going forward.- Deregulation -When it comes to the legislative arena, labels, artists and producers have found little success.Several bills have been introduced in the US Congress, but nothing concrete has resulted. A few states — notably Tennessee, home to much of the powerful country music industry — have adopted protective legislation, notably when it comes to deepfakes.Donald Trump poses another potential roadblock: the Republican president has postured himself as a champion of deregulation, particularly of AI. Several giants in AI have jumped into the ring, notably Meta, which has urged the administration to “clarify that the use of publicly available data to train models is unequivocally fair use.”If Trump’s White House takes that advice, it could push the balance against music professionals, even if the courts theoretically have the last word.The landscape is hardly better in Britain, where the Labor government is considering overhauling the law to allow AI companies to use creators’ content on the internet to help develop their models, unless rights holders opt out.More than a thousand musicians, including Kate Bush and Annie Lennox, released an album in February entitled “Is This What We Want?” — featuring the sound of silence recorded in several studios — to protest those efforts.For analyst Goldman, AI is likely to continue plaguing the music industry — as long as it remains unorganized.”The music industry is so fragmented,” he said. “I think that that winds up doing it a disservice in terms of solving this thing.”

In 2008, scriptwriter Ed Bennett-Coles said he experienced a career “death moment”: he read an article about AI managing to write its first screenplay.Nearly two decades later, he and friend Jamie Hartman, a songwriter, have developed a blockchain-based application they hope will empower writers, artists and others to own and protect their work.”AI is coming in, swooping in and taking so many people’s jobs,” Hartman said. Their app, he said, responds “no… this is our work.””This is human, and we decide what it’s worth, because we own it.”The ever-growing threat of AI looms over intellectual property and livelihoods across creative industries.Their app, ARK, aims to log ownership of ideas and work from initial brainchild to finished product: one could register a song demo, for example, simply by uploading the file, the creators explained to AFP.Features including non-disclosure agreements, blockchain-based verification and biometric security measures mark the file as belonging to the artist who uploaded it.Collaborators could then also register their own contributions throughout the creative process.ARK “challenges the notion that the end product is the only thing worthy of value,” said Bennett-Coles as his partner nodded in agreement.The goal, Hartman said, is to maintain “a process of human ingenuity and creativity, ring-fencing it so that you can actually still earn a living off it.”- Checks and balances -Due for a full launch in summer 2025, ARK has secured funding from the venture capital firm Claritas Capital and is also in strategic partnership with BMI, the performing rights organization.And for Hartman and Bennett-Coles, its development has included a lot of existential soul-searching.”I saw a quote yesterday which really sums it up: it’s that growth for growth’s sake is the philosophy of the cancer cell,” said Bennett-Coles. “And that’s AI.””The sales justification is always quicker and faster, but like really we need to fall in love with process again.”He likened the difference between human-created art and AI content to a child accompanying his grandfather to the butcher, versus ordering a slab of meat from an online delivery service.The familial time spent together — the walk to and from the shop, the conversations in between running the errand — are “as important as the actual purchase,” he said.In the same way, “the car trip that Jamie makes when he’s heading to the studio might be as important to writing that song as what happens in the studio itself.”AI, they say, devalues that creative process, which they hope ARK can reassert.It’s “a check and a balance on behalf of the human being,” Hartman said.- ‘Rise out of the ashes’ -The ARK creators said they decided the app must be blockchain-based — with data stored on a digital ledger of sorts — because it’s decentralized.”In order to give the creator autonomy and sovereignty over their IP and control over their destiny, it has to be decentralized,” Bennett-Coles said.App users will pay for ARK according to a tiered structure, they said, levels priced according to storage use needs.They intend ARK to stand up in a court of law as a “recording on the blockchain” or a “smart contract,” the scriptwriter explained, calling it “a consensus mechanism.””Copyright is a pretty good principle — as long as you can prove it, as long as you can stand behind it,” Hartman added, but “the process of registering has been fairly archaic for a long time.””Why not make progress in copyright, as far as how it’s proven?” he added. “We believe we’ve hit upon something.”Both artists said their industries have been too slow to respond to the rapid proliferation of AI.Much of the response, Bennett-Coles said, has to start with the artists having their own “death moments” similar to what he experienced years ago.”From there, they can rise out of the ashes and decide what can be done,” he said. “How can we preserve and maintain what it is we love to do, and what’s important to us?”

A measles outbreak has killed a second child in the southwestern United States, authorities said Sunday, with almost 650 people now infected as the highly contagious disease spreads. “We are deeply saddened to report that a school-aged child who was recently diagnosed with measles has passed away,” Aaron Davis, vice president of UMC Health System, a medical center in Texas, told AFP.The child had been receiving treatment for “complications of measles” in hospital, he said, adding they were “not vaccinated against measles and had no known underlying health conditions.”As the US grapples with its worst measles outbreak in years, President Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has alarmed health experts with his past rhetoric downplaying the importance of vaccines.Kennedy, however, posted on X Sunday that “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”He added that his Health and Human Services (HHS) department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were supporting distribution of the shots in Texas.Kennedy, who said he had traveled to Texas to comfort the child’s family, also tallied “642 confirmed cases of measles across 22 states, 499 of those in Texas” as of Sunday.Questioned by journalists aboard Air Force One, Trump appeared to downplay the outbreak as “so far a fairly small number of people relative to what we’re talking about.”But he added that if it “progresses, we’ll have to take action very strongly,” without giving further details.- ‘Importance of vaccination’ -The CDC has recorded cases stretching from Alaska to Florida, as well as in New York City.Texas had reported its first measles death, also of a child, in late February — marking the first US fatality from the disease in nearly a decade.The death of a New Mexico adult last month was also classified by the CDC as a measles-related fatality. The vast majority of measles cases tallied by the CDC — 97 percent — are patients not vaccinated against the measles, it said on April 3.Some 196 of them were under five years old, 240 were aged 5-19, and an additional 159 were aged 20 years or older, with a few others of unknown age, the health agency said. The CDC, which defines an “outbreak” as three or more related cases, has recorded six outbreaks so far in 2025. Some 93 percent of the confirmed cases are related to those outbreaks.”For comparison, 16 outbreaks were reported during 2024 and 69 percent of cases (198 of 285) were outbreak-associated,” it said on its website.”This unfortunate event underscores the importance of vaccination,” Davis, of UMC Health System in Texas, said in an email regarding the latest death.”We encourage all individuals to stay current with their vaccinations to protect themselves and the broader community.”

Violent storms battering the central-eastern United States have killed at least 17 people, officials said Sunday, with the National Weather Service warning of “devastating” flash flooding.Flood warnings remain in effect, particularly in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, according to forecasters. Tennessee has been the hardest hit, with 10 deaths recorded in the western part of the state. Kentucky and Missouri each report two deaths, while Arkansas, Indiana, and Mississippi each count one, with tolls that could still rise.In Jeffersontown, Kentucky, buildings were left destroyed by a reported tornado, an AFP correspondent saw.Photos shared on social and local media showed widespread damage from the storm across several states, with homes torn apart, toppled trees, downed power lines and overturned cars.The National Weather Service said Sunday that “there is still some threat for heavy rainfall and flash flooding for portions of the Southeast and the Gulf Coast region going through this evening and overnight.””Flooding has reached record levels in many communities,” Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear wrote on social media Saturday, urging residents in the state to “avoid travel, and never drive through water.”Almost 140,000 customers were without power in five affected states Sunday, according to tracking website PowerOutage.us.Scientists say global warming is disrupting climate patterns and the water cycle, making extreme weather more frequent and ferocious.Last year set a record for high temperatures in the United States, with the country also pummeled by a barrage of tornadoes and destructive hurricanes.