“If A.I. learns, we should earn!” That was the battle cry in Times Square as the AFM began the latest round of negotiations for our international master recording contract, the Sound Recording Labor Agreement. A host of allies – including Local 802 and many others – rallied on March 11 with live music provided by Local 802 members and Five Borough Brass under a union contract.

The AFM is currently bargaining with Sony, Universal, Hollywood Records and Warner. Together, those labels own the bulk of recorded popular music, including tens of thousands of hours of music created by AFM members going back decades.

Besides fighting for fair wage increases and benefits, musicians are demanding consent, compensation and credit when it comes to A.I. This is the real battleground.

As AFM President Tino Gagliardi powerfully stated: “Human creativity is the engine of the entertainment industry. We are fighting for a future where musicians have a decisive say in how their work is used, sampled, or imitated.”

DIGGING INTO THE DETAILS

At this point in the evolution of generative A.I., it’s important that musicians know exactly what we’re fighting for, so let’s break down this slogan.

On the surface, it’s actually easy to understand: if the record labels allow our music to be “trained” or “ingested” by A.I., then we demand:

CONSENT: musicians should be able to opt in or out

CREDIT: musicians should be named and credited

COMPENSATION: there must be financial payments to musicians

But when it comes to A.I. exploiting musicians, it’s not as simple as A.I. taking a guitar riff and then spitting back that riff exactly. If that were the whole situation, such theft would already be illegal copyright violation and easy to track.

Instead, what we’re fighting against is A.I. being “trained” on the entire catalog of a record label.

How could this happen – and what leverage does the union have?

Consider if a record label sells or licenses its entire library of recordings to an A.I. company like Suno or OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) or Anthropic (maker of Claude) or Alphabet (Google/YouTube).

That means that the guitar riff that you played on an album gets ingested by A.I. as part of the entire song, turned into smaller data bits called tokens or spectrograms, embedded into hundreds of mathematical dimensions, analyzed using linear algebra, processed and randomized using algorithms, and absorbed into the A.I.’s learned patterns. After all this, A.I. can generate music that’s just different enough so that it’s not an exact copy of your riff – but can sound stylistically similar. Not only this, but your riff (or your vocals, or your lyrics, or even the entire song) becomes part of the A.I.’s patterns that it uses to spit out other artificial or machine-made art.

The truth and the crime is that the A.I. “version” of your riff or your song couldn’t have existed without your music and your creativity. That’s why we call it theft.

Here’s our leverage point: A.I. works through mass ingesting of data – a “corpus,” in the A.I. lingo. We say that record labels must not be able to include YOUR music in this “corpus” without consent, credit and compensation. If your music isn’t in the corpus, then A.I. can’t exploit it. To put it another way, A.I. needs the collective music of millions of recordings in order to have a large dataset. That is the leverage that musicians possess collectively through the power of their union.
Local 802 President Dan Point hit the right note when saying: “Musicians are leading the fight for fair wages, health care, retirement benefits, protection against A.I. theft, and – most important of all – a voice at the table. We demand consent, compensation and credit when A.I. is trained on our creative work. If A.I. learns, we should earn!”

HONOR ROLL

Our rally brought together top AFM leaders and allies:

• AFM International President Tino Gagliardi
• Local 802 President Dan Point
• Local 47 President Marc Sazer
• AFM International Vice President and Local 257 President Dave Pomeroy
• AFM Vice President from Canada Allistair Elliott
• Dusty Kelly, AFM international executive board member and executive director of the Toronto Musicians’ Association (AFM Local 149)
• Congressman Jerry Nadler
• Actors Equity Association Executive Director Al Vincent Jr.
• Musician and bargaining unit member Caleb Vaughn-Jones
• Musicians Marc Ribot and Jerome Harris and allies from the Music Worker Alliance
• WGA East Secretary-Treasurer Sasha Stewart
• RMA President Allen Fogle

You can watch clips of the rally on the Instagram pages of the AFM, Local 802 and elsewhere. To support the campaign, sign the petition at https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-human-artistry