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Elvis borrowed from Black artists. Now his songs’ owners are suing AI
Depending on who you talk to, Elvis Presley was either the king of rock ‘n’ roll or a no-good thief.
The legendary singer’s legacy has gone through about as many re-evaluations as Presley himself had jumpsuits. His long-held status as an originator of rock music was obviously not quite the whole story. A minute of research, or just an honest accounting that nearly all his early rockabilly hits were cover songs, puts the lie to the idea that Elvis was a drawling bolt from the blue.
He took the genre to new heights of popularity, with a hip-swinging style and a (white) babyface, but the music that Elvis sold so well predated him by decades. The prehistory of rock ‘n’ roll is full of names who might have become stars if they were gifted with his baby blues or discovered by a relentless schemer on the level Col. Tom Parker.
Then, as something of a corrective to the idea that Elvis was the end-all, be-all of early rock music, the revisionist idea that he was nothing more than a Pat Boone-type, a watered-down middling talent whose success only came on the backs of better Black originators took hold in the sort of circles that like to argue about music history. That was, of course, just as false. Presley was a remarkable performer with a magnificent voice and an ear for hits. His reliance on songwriters was not unusual for its time, with the idea of performers also being their own primary songwriters only arising by way of the rock bands like the Beatles who emerged in Elvis’ wake.
That conception of Elvis has also faded in recent years, in no small part thanks to Baz Luhrmann’s glitzy, campy 2022 biopic. But you could forgive some people for rolling their eyes when they saw the news that the companies that own the rights to Presley’s music and likeness were suing Anthropic, accusing the AI company’s chatbots of lifting scraping hundreds of Elvis’ songs in service of creating AI-generated pseudo-music. How could the owners of this catalog, of all people, object to well-funded operations cranking out simulations?
The lawsuit, filed earlier this month in a San Francisco federal court, accuses Anthropic of engaging in “copyright infringement at a scale never seen before.” The owners of Elvis’ catalog claim that Anthropic used their songs as training data without permission or payment. They make the point that Presley’s music isn’t unique in this regard, alleging that Anthropic has done pretty much the same thing with all manner of recorded music, in blatant defiance of copyright law. Anthropic software could never have created songs that sound so similar to Presley’s out of whole cloth, the plaintiffs say, and instead relied on ill-gotten data.
Anthropic software could never have created songs that sound so similar to Presley’s out of whole cloth, the lawsuit claims, and must have relied instead on ill-gotten data.
“Anthropic has essentially put to the test the adage of whether monkeys and typewriters could, provided enough time, recreate Hamlet,” the lawsuit states. “Anthropic found a workaround. Rather than training its monkeys (the AI models) from first principles, Anthropic found mimicry (i.e. copyright infringement) to be the much easier pursuit.”
The plaintiffs say they tested Claude, asking it to crank out modern updates to Presley hits. The results were “very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges.”
“That’s edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out,” they wrote.
The proprietors of Presley’s material are demanding more than $41 million in damages. Anthropic has denied any wrongdoing.
“We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully,” Anthropic said in a statement.
Given the AI industry’s hostility toward intellectual property rights, it’s not a stretch to imagine that a major player may have trained its models on some of the most famous songs in recorded music history. It’s also not hard to imagine the estates of Big Mama Thornton and Arthur Crudup — should any such entities exist — scoffing at those headlines.
But even if we concede that Elvis was elevated to stardom in large part because a racist public was unwilling to buy the same songs from Black artists, and even if we picture the late king as a conniving tyrant extracting unconscionable wealth from an underclass of geniuses who remained unrecognized, the rights holders are right to cry foul. That’s because stealing, begging or borrowing material in service of an artistic creation made by real people is enormously different from some corporation doing it to build a better Mechanical Turk.
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Presley was a lot of things: a hick from Tupelo who loved R&B and gospel in equal measure, a white performer of Black music who undoubtedly benefited from the segregated pop charts, a tragic figure whose opioid addiction and poor health led to an early death. But he was also a man, flesh and blood. Anything he could create by virtue of his expelling air through his vocal chords carries more intrinsic value than a billion Claude prompts (which is doubly true true once you know that all of these AI companies operate at a loss). If you need convincing, just look at his 1977 performance of “Unchained Melody.”
The song itself is no great feat. Its creation was a purely commercial affair, written for the soundtrack of a ‘50s prison movie that no one remembers. A weepy ballad about longing for a lost love while behind bars, it had been recorded many times over by the time an ailing Elvis brought it out during a concert in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Overweight and profusely sweating, the visibly failing superstar belts the Righteous Brothers’ version of the song while seated at the piano, with a band member holding the microphone. Barely two months before his death, Presley gives everything he’s got left to the song’s central question: “Are you still mine?”
Even from this distance, nearly a half-century later, it’s still capable of raising the hair on your arms. That moment, a brief section of a borrowed song from a washed-up and dying man, carries more weight than even the most faithful AI recreation or iteration. That moment is exactly why rights holders have a duty to push back against any attempts for AI companies to pretend their chatbots are included in the old chestnut that “great artists steal.”
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The post Elvis borrowed from Black artists. Now his songs’ owners are suing AI appeared first on Salon.com.
