Music industry groups have cautiously welcomed the outcome of last week's negotiations around the European Union's AI Act following concerns that transparency obligations in the new regulations would be watered down.
The version of the act in place following last week's talks is "a step in the right direction" and contains the "essential principles", say reps for the music community, though things need to be further refined at at technical level.
For the music industry, the transparency obligations in the act are particularly important, with copyright owners wanting AI companies to be fully transparent about what data has been used to train their AI models, and for AI-generated content to be clearly labelled.
With the act now in the final phase of negotiation, it was known that the governments of certain EU member states, following fierce lobbying from the tech sector, were keen to relax some of those obligations.
However, on Friday, the European Parliament and EU Council confirmed that a provisional agreement had been reached, saying that "it was agreed that general purpose AI systems, and the GPAI models they are based on, will have to adhere to transparency requirements as initially proposed by Parliament”.
These include “drawing up technical documentation, complying with EU copyright law and disseminating detailed summaries about the content used for training".
Responding to that news, German song rights collecting society GEMA said: "The results we now have on the table are a step in the right direction but need to be sharpened further on a technical level. The outcome must be a clearly formulated transparency regime that obliges AI providers to submit detailed evidence on the contents they used to train their systems, just like other major legal systems such as the US managed to implement".
Meanwhile, the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry stated: “While technical details are not yet finalised, this agreement makes clear that essential principles - such as meaningful transparency obligations and respect of EU copyright standards for any GPAI model that operates in the internal market - must be fully reflected in the final legislation and its concrete application if we are to achieve our mutual goals".