Tidal AI Policy

I strongly agree on labeling the generated content.

Would love for YouTube to follow suit on this

> Tidal will hold AI-generated music to a higher standard of content integrity. We will not tolerate AI-generated music that exploits an individual’s or group’s music, name or likeness, deceives listeners, or diminishes the quality of our service.

I think this is a very reasonable approach, and probably also the best way to treat AI-powered copyright infringement as a whole. Just like we don't penalize artists for consuming content unless they produce actually infringing content, we should set the same focus for AI systems.

> Starting today, AI-generated music will not be monetizable. We are only in the beginning of the era of AI-generated music.

Don't really agree that this follows from the stated principle here ("... ensuring royalties go to original works produced, written and performed by people"), but will definitely help with spam etc.

But AI does seem to make it easier.

Also not that it takes skill to come up with a remix/cover/homage of a song that is close enough to the original that people can enjoy it like the original, but not so close that you are just plagiarizing it. So this problem before AI is limited to talented musicians who for some reason would rather copy somebody else then to make their own music.

IMO they need to focus on the scam side more than the AI side.

Let them do, if they like to listen, whom are you to say their tastes are bad ?

> 97% of people can’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human made music

https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/11/deezer-ipsos-survey-ai-m...

Other people seem to be fine with it. Why wouldn't they?

Similar feelings about Nebula vs YouTube, although Nebula straight up doesn’t have entire genres, or videos in languages other than English, so it doesn’t really work as a general recommendation.

> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle

because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.

Obviously if one doesn't read these genres, this is a whole foreign world, but it is increasingly the state of mainstream fiction reading, and AI slop is a problem for them that you may be asked to help avoid if you are the nerdy loved one of such a reader.

Or, you know, you've just read the old books already because they came out 10 years ago and that's a lot of time to read.

I doubt it has anything to do with "romantasy" as a genre, anything that has people actually reading books, on a regular basis (as opposed to the people who mean reading as consuming one "notable" novel a year).

In any case, epublishing has made a lot more books available and filtering through them was a difficult task even before AI increased the output dramatically.

I've been saying for a while now there's a large untapped market for actually effective recommendation systems (almost certainly human driven given the demonstrated limitations of computer systems so far), as mentioned it was a problem to find "the good stuff" even among just self-published pre-ai books, now it's way beyond that.

I guess to some degree it's the same basic problem as spam filtering, but considerably more nuanced and difficult.

It's big business and is really not that deep. For someone who isn't part of that world(which is big business) to judge what is good or not is hard.

And now it's cheap to produce that "pulp romance" novels en masse. So people who have little clue about this genre can produce something that seems good, but doesn't appeal to the reader.

My favorite implementation of this is talking to the clerks at my neighborhood bookstore. But the New York Review of Books is an alternative that’s easier to enjoy from home. For romance novels I like the blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books. Also this is kind of cheating but I have a family member who reviews books for a library journal so a lot of the time I just let her tell me what to read.

I've found myself applying this rule, sometimes unintentionally, to almost all media I consume. It's now a very rare occasion that there's something new that I want to read, watch, or listen to. It just isn't that good, tbh. My music library is full of music from ~2018 and older, most books I enjoy are even older than that, and I can't remember the last time a movie came out that I was dying to see since about 2016-ish.

It's not like I'm intentionally filtering out for old stuff, my own tastes just seem to prefer it. Not sure if its due to my own age (I'm not that old, mid thirties), or if we've just so over optimized media for revenue extraction that its become too formulaic and boring.

However, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, in my opinion there is some new good stuff (books, music, movies, etc.) still being created, even if it's harder to find in the sea of mediocrity.

Claiming otherwise is to treat each book as a packet of Pokémon trading cards, where you know you’re getting some cards, but you don’t get to choose which ones.

I don't understand this. Who goes to an online store to decide what to read? Rather than just buy what you wanted to buy.

I would expect that people were going to.. places where people talk about books. Like goodreads, or even some interesting thread on /r/books, or whatever. And then, well, after you decide what to read, you think about how you will obtain it. I think people have their priorities inverted.

And I think like that because the storefront doesn't have your best interest at heart. For them you're just a number on a bottom line.

Its the same process online and offline: See an interesting cover/title, read the dust cover, skim a page to get the writing style, buy or dont buy.

Sure, you will get "more bad than good" but not everything needs to be efficient, and in the old days, the bookstore played the role of curator so you could have a great experience spending a few hours in the store. You would come away having discovered a book that isnt the hotest thing on some review site or message board. That's probably the experience she has been replicating, but now the overall quality has gone down.

I don't know exactly how the incentives work for uploading shitloads of different slop readings of old novels on there, but it seemed to show no sign of slowing down.

People who like to write lyrics, but can't afford to pay a vocalist still deserve to get their art materialized and distributed.

and they can pay someone who can play an instrument to make it happen, or do it themselves.

So begins the Clone Wars...

Is this their responsibility? Just restrict payment to the registered copyright holder or their delegate, require registration of copyright for music to be payment-eligible, and escalate the problem to a federal crime with (presumedly) federal enforcement, no? Sure, some people will commit federal crimes to get a payout, but it's gotta reduce the problem massively.

I may be in the minority but I like AI generated music. Do you ever really like a song in the current moment and want one almost exactly like that? Mostly for background music. I like to listen to synthwave while working and since I may listen for 10-20h a week, I hear the same songs over and over. Maybe I should be more selective or curate my playlist, but it's just work. I would love a stream of AI generated music in a particular style I can work to.

Some people are listening to music as an experience, internalizing lyrics, empathizing with the feeling and vibes of the artist. Others are just wanting something pop-y as background noise while they do work. They come together and since they're arguing for different needs, the whole thing turns into a mess.

There's a reason why a few artists persist through the decades, while others just fade into obscurity.(think of how long Madonna, Cher have been around)

AI generated music is also not at all original. Which scares all of the "artists" who lack originality.

This is a musicaly illterate position. You only find the instruments passable because you're not familiar enough with music. You hear vocals and because you have a decent understanding of what a human should sound like you can tell how bad it sounds. Anyone with a musical ear hears the same thing of the horrible AI generated instrumentals.

As a lifelong songwriter, using AI to produce my own melodies and lyrics lets me listen to the diary of my own life, which allows me to reminsce and realize my songs are the best songs ever for JUST me :). I dont subject others to them ... much.

dozens if not hundreds of synthwave channels and internet radio stations. but sure, listen to your ai slop muzak.

A synthesizer is not AI.

What if I prompt Claude to go prompt Suno? What if the same chain happens internally at Suno? Easy to imagine the human input being very dilute and a small part overall.

Raw LLM output is automatically public domain.

Raw LLM output lacks human authorship, and it was ruled cannot be registered for copyright protection. Raw LLM output is automatically public domain (which is also why its silly for Anthropic to be in such a tizzy about China using Claude's output, Claude's output is public domain).

Only the parts of a work that are human authored can be registered for copyright. If a work was created with AI assistance, the parts that were purely AI generated cannot be registered.

The US copyright office also ruled that prompt engineering does not count as human authorship.

So all those people using Suno to generate AI slop music and flooding the streaming services, their output is almost certainly public domain.

I don't see how it's any more weird than reddit/stackoverflow/linkedin trying to clamp down on AI scrapers, even though they don't own the copyright to the UGC that they're preventing the bots from accessing.

Anthropic (and others) are trying to protect a stream of uncopyrightable, public-domain machine outputs.

Its like if you made a painting and put it in a museum. You still technically own the copyright, but the museum owns the building. They can lock the door, charge admissino, kick out anyone they want, prevent anyone they want from seeing it, etc. You licensing it to them makes it their private property to do with what they wish.

> I can't tell them "yeah it's fine to scrape my comment, don't put up any captcha walls".

Correct, because you signed away that control.

> what if I dedicate my comments to the public domain?

That means you forfeit copyright, but you cannot waive the platform's rights regarding their servers.

But, because you still retain copyright (or in the case that its public domain), you can and are welcome to submit it to AI companies yourself. Just because Reddit may not allow a scraper, that doesn't remove my right as the copyright holder to re-submit my comment to another platform that does allow the scraper.

The difference with Anthropic/LLM output is that there are zero intellectual property rights over the outputs once they leave the API endpoint.

They don't need to sublicense it because the license was already granted by you. Stackoverflow comments are licensed under creative commons, which means you don't need to seek a license from stackoverflow to use it. It's same if you found some random MIT licensed repo on github. It's not github granting you a sublicense, it's coming from the original author.

>You still technically own the copyright, but the museum owns the building. They can lock the door, charge admissino, kick out anyone they want, prevent anyone they want from seeing it, etc.

And Anthropic can't decide who gets to use their service, and for what purpose?

It still breaks down once the output has left the system though. Anthropic cannot tell you what you can and cannot do with the LLM's output, they do not own that, its public domain. Anthropic can pursue breach of contract, maybe, but they can't do anything regarding your use of the model's output. If China can't access Claude directly, they can just pay some other user in the states to run some prompts and paste the output on a public website, and then use that output and there is nothing Anthropic can do about it.

Fair point on StackOverflow, but they are the exception rather than the norm. Most social media doesn't license the content under creative commons.

And are they actually doing this? For instance, if you read their press releases about distillation attacks[1], they're not asserting copyright over the outputs, only alleging "fraudulent accounts". So far as I can tell they're not even engaging in legal action.

[1]https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

They are also constantly using the word "illicit" and theft in their communications, and in their lobbying, when there nothing illicit about using model output to train another model. They are trying to create an aura of criminality where none exists.

> But distillation can also be used for illicit purposes: competitors can use it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently.

They do have leverage over fraudulent accounts, yes, but the resulting distillation from those is out of their control under the current legal framework. There's nothing they can do about it, for now.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/anthropic-claims...

I don't see how this is any different than say linkedin sending cease and desist letters invoking the CFAA, DMCA, and "trespass".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn#Backgroun...

This is giving weird independent moral grounding to AI as more than a computer that has never existed before. And what kind of AI does it count for ? Does it also count for image classifiers? For image quality improvers? etc

> “Authors have long used such tools to create their works or to recast, transform, or adapt their expressive authorship. … what matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work's expression and actually formed the traditional elements of authorship.”

The USCO doesn't care what type of algorithm is used, it cares who determined the traditional elements of authorship. If a human dictates the expression, and then uses a computer to clean, translate, or refine it, it is copyrightable. If a human just provides an idea and a generative algorithm creates the specific expression, the output is public domain. One is using spellcheck, the other is telling the computer "Write me a novel" and letting the computer generate it.

What about protein language models that create new protein drugs, can pharmaceutical companies not protect them too? That's straight up the same time of model as LLMs and image models.

Copyright is a human concept, to protect the exclusive licensing of a human creation. We don't grant copyright to machine output.

Your later example would be more than likely protected via patent, not copyright.

Furthermore, it is an oracle built on copyright infringement.

Do you understand the difference between "tool" and "oracle"?

Oracles are things that give you free stuff if you've been a good boy and respected the oracle's rituals.

Whereas AI (if we ignore RNG for a moment) will produce the same output from the same prompt. It's not a tool, it's a magic box that spits out a finished product with no human effort outside of the prompt.