Using Artificial Intelligence in Music Creation? a Survey Based on Copyright Consciousness

Artificial intelligence (AI) hits music creation. With the assistance of AI, the threshold of music generation decreases. Users are capable of generating high-quality music for entertainment and business purposes. As the increasing number of music generated by either AI algorithms or musicians, who should be responsible for or benefit from the music? Whether the music is public property or private property is widely argued. This study focuses on copyright consciousness of music created by AI algorithms. To understand copyright consciousness, this study investigated five copyright determinants (economic incentive, independence, creativity, intelligence effort, and tool property) and identified eight music creation scenarios based on stakeholders (programmers, music producers and end-users) and the degree of AI involvement (fully autonomous, partially autonomous, and automatic) through survey research. This study ended up with 137 valid responses via online survey platforms. Kruskal-Wallis test and logistic regression were used for data analysis. According to the results, this study indicated that creativity and tool property were important for programmers’ copyright consciousness; economic incentive mattered end-users’ copyright consciousness; economic incentive, independence, and creativity were critical for music producers’ copyright consciousness. Moreover, tool property influenced overall copyright consciousness in AI creative spaces, while intelligence effort was increasingly important as the growth of the degree of AI involvement. Gathering the results, this study proposed a copyright consciousness framework for suggesting critical copyright determinants for recognizing AI music as personal or public property from the perspective of different stakeholders. As the increasing use of AI in music creation, this study believes that the results and proposed framework could help understand copyright consciousness from various aspects, which should be foundations for developing future human-centered AI-related copyright.