how to poison AI music scrapers

AI music generators are not only the product of scraped (read: stolen) music, they’re also threatening the livelihood of musicians. But there are people who are finding ways to fight back – by using a technique called poison pilling. This week, Dexter talks to two of them: Benn Jordan, a musician and YouTuber who developed a tool called Poisonify, and Jian Liu, the lead developer of HarmonyCloak and Music Shield. These programs add imperceptible noise to a music file rendering it indecipherable to an AI model – and we got to test out how these work with our own theme song.

Read + Watch:

Benn’s YouTube video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMYm2d9bmEA

Jian Liu and Syed Irfan’s paper on HarmonyCloak – https://mosis.eecs.utk.edu/publications/meerza2024harmonycloak.pdf

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