It can be presumed that Spotify is doing that to some degree. There is consensus amongst scientists studying the field, artists, labels and other people in the field about that.

The public domain thing is kind a useless argument at this point; It is the case law we are building upon currently but that’s basically just because haven’t gotten a broader legal framework yet and we’re still making AI fit into what we have.

But we don’t have to answer by citing to the law, we can answer by looking at the ethics and expecting the law to loosely follow our ethics - that’s what it is designed to do.

• AI takes ideas from other artists without giving credit
• AI is trained on art without paying for it
• AI can use other artists branding and likeness without their consent
• artists make less because AI takes an increasingly bigger cut of the revenue (it’s kinda zero-sum, but let’s skip that conversation)
• AI music can only exist because artists exist, SE we need to keep paying artists enough to keep working
• AI might is possibly being used in some instances for money laundering

And so on.

I’m trying to say this because the law is there to follow our feelings. If we structurally don’t condone something to a certain level as a society, we make it illegal or we regulate it.

And as you can see, there’s plenty of reasons to regulate and some are straight up financial, so we definitely should do something about it.

And with “we” I mean specifically the Republicans and Democrats, the FCC (regulation to combat market disruption), judges, civil rights lawyers, and possible plaintiffs all have the chance to push us into a better position societally.

Shoutout to Bernie Sanders, he’s trying to start a movement about it, and as always he’s ahead of the curve in Congress.