HarmonyCloak slips silent poison into music to corrupt AI copies
Generative AI systems need to be fed huge amounts of data, with copyrighted materials often on the menu. Musicians may now have a way to fight back with HarmonyCloak, a system that embeds data into songs that can’t be picked up by human ears but will scramble AI trying to reproduce it.
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In order to generate Facebook images that trick your Nan into praising a fake kid who made a giant Jesus out of eggs, AI systems first need to be trained on eye-watering amounts of data. The more content that’s poured into these models, the more detailed, accurate and diverse the end results can be. So companies like OpenAI and Anthropic just scrape the entirety of human creative output – in other words, the internet.
But a little thing called copyright keeps cropping up as a thorn in their sides. Nintendo wasn’t too pleased that Meta AI allowed users to generate emoji stickers depicting Mario characters brandishing rifles, for instance. But while the big content owners have the resources to either sue AI companies or strike up lucrative licensing deals, small creators often get shafted.
Researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Lehigh University have now developed a new tool that could help musicians protect their work from being fed into the machine. It’s called HarmonyCloak, and it works by effectively embedding a new layer of noise into music that human ears can’t detect but AI 'ears' can’t tune out.
This extra noise is dynamically created to blend into the specific characteristics of any given piece of music, remaining below the human hearing threshold. But any errant AI models that scrape the music can’t figure out which bits to ignore, so it kind of poisons the well and ruins their attempts at recreation.
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