Nashville Songwriters Urge Capitol Hill for Stricter AI Regulation

Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) have taken their concerns about the use of artificial intelligence in the music industry straight to Washington, D.C., urging lawmakers for stricter regulations.   

Since the use of AI is already rampant in the entertainment industry and people are having difficulties trying to distinguish what’s real from what’s machine-generated, the NSAI is urging Capitol Hill to put clear regulations in place to govern its use.  

NSAI Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Turnbow said, “Most of these AI tools will go through the internet and they scrape, which means they basically just gobble up any sort of content they can get from the internet, often from pirate sites. They take all that data and they break it all down into little micro bits so that they can then reformulate it into outputs based on how users are asking for that.”  

Songwriter Jen Schott added, “Once our creations are out in the world, being scraped by AI, learned, ingested, and then new songs being created with pieces of my song as a part of it. Then we’re competing against those songs and just trying to make a living.”  

Schott still acknowledges how the technology is able to help them as songwriters. “There are some wonderful tools with building demos, ways to pitch songs, it makes those opportunities more affordable for us. As creators, when you’re working on like a song demo, it is really fascinating to prompt one of these AI apps that will create a demo and how quickly it can bring something up.”  

Still, there are limitations to the use of AI in songwriting. “You’re losing that magic of the studio,” Schott said. “When I’m in the room with another songwriter or with an artist, we’re sharing our stories, we’re sharing experiences that we’ve gone through that I don’t believe something that’s not human can create.”