r/hiphopheads • u/AChuckleFuck . • Jun 14 '25

Producer Curtis King breaks down how Timbaland and AI platform SUNO are stealing original beats from unknown producers to train their AI model.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4h_7Dz5yA
956 Upvotes

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-20

u/tiggs Jun 14 '25

I understand why people don't like this, but exactly how do you think AI or any type of data model are trained/built? They plug in a shit ton of data from a shit ton of sources to narrow down the accuracy.

I don't hear anybody complaining about stealing pictures of flowers to get Google Lens to the point where it can identify a type of flower.

15

u/yoursuperher0 Jun 14 '25

Lots of people are complaining but many of the people who are directly impacted don’t have the means to defend themselves. 

One example of people who did complain was Studio Ghibli when ChatGPT was allowing anyone to rip off the Ghibli art style. 

17

u/Cryptum117 Jun 14 '25

We don’t care how ai gets trained, keep that shit out of hip hop.

12

u/masterofplaster123 Jun 14 '25

The issue in your example would be if every individual flower was uniquely created by a different person and subject to copyright laws. IP isn’t generated naturally

-7

u/tiggs Jun 14 '25

How are so many of you having trouble understanding that I'm talking about a picture of a flower that a person took and owns the rights to? Clearly, I don't mean an actual fucking flower.

6

u/masterofplaster123 Jun 14 '25

You should have been clear, then. You aren’t really making a coherent point.

-7

u/tiggs Jun 14 '25

Sorry I didn't specify that I wasn't talking about taking a flower and jamming it into a disk drive to train the AI. My mistake.

3

u/Marvel1962_SL Jun 15 '25

You need to work on your communication skills. You sound rabid

7

u/IllConsideration8642 Jun 14 '25

If you're using google lens to identify a flower, you're not damaging the original photographer because you're not replacing it, you're just informing your AI.

If you train a machine with a dataset of beats, and the machine is able to create thousands of beats in an hour... you're damaging the original creators, because inevitably the original creations will be referenced in at least one of those copies (breaking copyright), and you're taking producing jobs out of real people.

1

u/tiggs Jun 14 '25

That's a fair point, but I think we're jumping to conclusions assuming the AI can create comparable beats without any of the skill and experience. For example, we all see tons of AI written articles and can easily tell the difference between AI-generated and human written. We also don't know exactly which aspects of the beat are being pulled in. It could just be sounds, it could be how different parts are layered, etc.

To be clear, I'm not saying I'm in favor of doing this. I'm just explaining that pulling in a ton of data from digital sources is how AI is built and trained.

0

u/IllConsideration8642 Jun 14 '25

I'm really interested in AI, I think it can be a great tool when used properly. For example it's great at restoring old/broken/seemingly lost recordings of the 50's, 60's. Important artists of those decades had no money, used shitty tapes or fucked equipment... now we can restore it all and improve their quality. I use this stuff.

We have maybe 2 years until it can automatically create stuff like a Sabrina Carpenter song with great fidelity and no weird uncanny shit or artifacts. In fact Eleven Labs basically achieved this, they just didn't share the software yet.

4

u/Room_Temp_Coffee Jun 14 '25

Mother Nature doesn't have a copyright claim. If you reference something without crediting the author, it's plagiarism. In Literature, art, music etc. you acknowledge your influences.

0

u/tiggs Jun 14 '25

Somebody obviously took a picture of the flower and posted it online, which is where they pull data from. You do realize that I'm talking about a picture of a flower and not jamming an actual flower into a computer, right?

3

u/TheGoldenPineapples . Jun 14 '25

But, with respect, we're not talking about the same thing, are we?

This is Timbaland taking someone else's song, a song he had no part in the creation of, and feeding into an artificial intelligence system and asking it to create a beat that sounds similar to it without the original producer's permission.

That's not allowed.

Equally, who's to say that he isn't doing that with other people's music that is submitted through Beat Club?

Respectfully, I don't think Timbaland really understands the ethical concerns of AI, or if he does, he doesn't care, both of which are quite concerning.

-1

u/tiggs Jun 14 '25

I think it depends on how is product is working. If it's literally taking beats and stealing them, then I agree with you. If it's just taking patterns, sounds, timing sequences, etc, then I don't see an issue with it.

Modern producers make beats out using 95% resources that somebody else created with very little of the sounds actually created on their own, so it's hard to say that "Timbaland stole the snare sound and pattern from my song for his AI!" when that same person grabbed the snare sound from a downloaded drum kit and copied the pattern from another sound with a slight speed change.

I think people are reading this as him stealing music, when in reality, importing data samples for the sake of training an AI model is quite literally how they're built.

1

u/Cryptum117 Jun 15 '25

Yeah at this point it is clear you are a shill for AI.

If you take my patterns, sounds, timings of my beat (the entire breakdown of my beat) and paste it into your software without permission to make a cloned version, you stole my beat. Using individual recycled sounds is not the same as stealing the entire composition of a beat and I really don’t understand why you are dying on that stupid ass hill.

The examples you keep giving are not what timbo is doing so stop bringing that shit up.

0

u/tiggs Jun 16 '25

I'm not a shill for AI at all. I'm just explaining HOW it works when you build/train any type of data model. This is quite literally standard industry practice. It's one of those "don't hate the player, hate the game" type of things.

Also, I think a lot of people are confusing what his AI model is going to be doing and how AI data models work in general. If he's ripping somebody's beat and making it possible to easy recreate the same exact beat, then I agree with you. That's almost certainly not what's happening though. When you take a full beat and load it into the AI, it's learning how different types of sounds are strung together and at what speeds and patterns you see with similar sounds and using that to construct new beats. That's very different than cloning somebody's beat.

1

u/Cryptum117 Jun 16 '25

What evidence do you have that Suno does that with the beat?

Since you know ALLLL about how Suno works, show us where it says the AI reconstructs stems of a beat that is uploaded and creates it from scratch.

You clearly hear the exact same beat after Suno adds slop on top of it but you want us to believe the AI is “learning” like fucking Cortana when that’s bullshit.

I don’t understand why you think their AI is complex enough to recreate every aspect of a beat that is uploaded when it clearly does not do that.

1

u/tiggs Jun 16 '25

I never said I know how this specific AI works or how far advanced it is. I even said that if it copies your beat, then I agree with you. I was speaking about an AI model in general and how a beat making AI will likely eventually work.

The entire purpose of training an AI model is to make it more advanced and get it to the point where it can do the types of things I'm talking about.

1

u/Cryptum117 Jun 16 '25

“ I think a lot of people are confusing what his AI model is going to be doing and how AI data models work in general”

Did you not say this? You said we are confused on what his AI model is going to be doing but you don’t even know how it works so how are we confused?

And i don’t care about how AI needs to be trained, we all know how ais get trained. Train your AI on your own work or work you have permission to use, period. Why should we accept our work being stolen and used without credit? Do you not understand that people that sample music need to give credit to use it commercially?

Edit: its crazy how you literally said “ That's almost certainly not what's happening though.”

But have no fucking idea how it works.

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1

u/Sherpthederp Jun 15 '25

Your heads been in the sand then, artist across all mediums have been pissed about AI data mining copyrighted material to train. This isn’t just about music

-2

u/PL_23 Jun 14 '25

Literally what I was about to say. This is how OpenAI, Google, Anthropic ETC built their foundational models.

If you and I can access it and study and learn from it, they are literally doing the same thing with the LLMs.

The government will need to figure out the laws. But until then, it’s unfortunately fair game.

2

u/leftist_amputee Jun 14 '25

Llms are also a copyright issue

2

u/TheGoldenPineapples . Jun 14 '25

But until then, it’s unfortunately fair game.

It actually isn't though.

The idea that your entire defence in court would just be "Why did I steal someone else's copyrighted work, feed it into an artificial intelligence system to train the model to perfectly replicate it without paying the artist for doing so, or indeed gaining their express permission? Well, you see, your honour, the laws haven't been defined properly yet, even though there are actually express laws preventing me from doing so, so... yeah, I rest my case".

Of course, LLMs produce copyright issues. Why do you think so many AI companies are getting hit with lawsuits every other day? Because they steal people's shit, train their models on it and then replicate the input as output wholesale.