Our Values

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What do we want to achieve with the AI Song Contest?

We are a small team that wants to help open up the possibilities of AI in the creative process.
On the way, we also want to educate creators on the ethical use AI tools.

What do we mean by “ethical use of AI”?

Panel Discussion “Lawyer-Creator Chat on AI Music and Copyright”
© Alejo Romero Fontán

We encourage a Contest which is fair for all: for the musicians, AI researchers, developers, and anyone else who is drawn by the possibilities of AI. Therefore, we promote practices which ensure that the interests and rights of original creators’ rights are fully respected.

How do we work to ensure that the AI Song Contest is fair?

01 Artist Control

We believe that artists should have control over their creative works and how they are used. Therefore, we do not support AI companies and tools that do not have the consent of the creators of their training data (or other input data).

02 Transparency

Since the first edition, we have introduced transparency into the process of evaluating entries through requiring the completion of a process document. This process document is a crucial part of our evaluation of songs to ensure that the human-AI co-creative process is led by human-driven creativity.

04 Education & Research

To assist further education and research in this field, the submissions from the AI Song Contest 2023 have been published as a dataset at ISMIR 2024, after a peer-reviewed publication process.

03 Cultural & Ethical Considerations

Our judging process also evaluates and scores different aspects of each project beyond the resulting song. This includes an evaluation of cultural and ethical considerations, originality of concept, and other factors (see Evaluation below).

What’s next for the AI Song Contest?

AI has proven to be a truly transformative technology. There are significant risks and concerns that still need to be addressed, but there are also wholly new reactive opportunities. From the ability to separate instruments out of a full song, to lyrical assistants, to completely new sonic palettes and genre mashing, the avenues for creativity in the AI space are vast.

With our foundational values of transparency and education, we strive to be the place where AI can truly be explored as a creative partner in an ethical way..

Our foundation believes that artists who are experimenting with this technology deserve a worthy platform to highlight their creative effort, a network to collaborate and support each other, and opportunities such as our Contest stage to showcase their work to the world.

Evaluation

The AI Song Contest is a pioneer in developing a unique approach to evaluating songs created through human-AI co-creative processes: we don’t just consider the song, but rather the entire process behind creating the song. We focus on evaluating the strength of the artistic vision, the creativity in the use of AI, the AI models used, sourcing of the training data, and the contestant’s own consideration of ethical and cultural issues.

We have also integrated a flagging system for detecting potential copyright infringements or other issues with entries. Introduced in 2023, this system is designed to trigger discussions with teams and increase transparency regarding the use of copyrighted materials in the song creation process.

Our organizational team has over 50 cumulative years of experience in the academic and legal spaces which span AI and music (Music Information Retrieval, Music Theory, Ethnomusicology, Human AI Interaction, and Copyright Law). Additionally, we’ve assembled a worldwide jury consisting of renowned academics and music practitioners, including those from MIT, Harvard, Amsterdam Music Lab, Berklee College of Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Sony CSL, and more.