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AI Statement

This explains FAWM’s perspective on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies in the platform, and expectations for how we think these could and should be used in the context of our songwriting challenges.

Background

Founding fawmer @burr is an AI/ML researcher by profession, and FAWM is quite excited about AI and its potential as a tool for making music. In fact, as far back as 2010, @burr created muse.fawm.org as a (nascent) exploration into AI-based songwriting tools specifically for the FAWM community (research paper here).

AI + the FAWM platform

Over time we plan to integrate AI-based personalization into the FAWM website in your home feeds, recommendations, search and discovery features, and so on.

Note

Most online platforms train AI/ML systems to maximize the time and/or money you spend on the platform.

FAWM is different. We are funded by your donations (not ads or sponsorships), so our systems are trained and deployed to try and optimize for your songwriting output, collaborations, and other goal-oriented and pro-social behaviors (see our previous research on this here and here).

As more AI systems are deployed at fawm.org, this document will be updated and we will provide model cards (think "nutrition labels" for AI) to be as fair and transparent as possible about how your data are used, and what role AI plays in your experience.

More complete documentation will come; for now FAWM has deployed just one ML model:

  • A spam account classifier available to moderators.
    This is trained on historical FAWM data to predict whether and account will be suspended or not, as a function of profile contents. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) for this model is 0.98 (near perfect). Account suspension is still a manual process carried out by the moderators, but this model helps us prioritize.

Info

FAWM sends no data to third-party AI APIs, and uses no third-party AI models except for occasional (offline, local) use of Stable Diffusion to partially generate visual assets (e.g., for social media or weekly challenge art).

Any models deployed on the FAWM platform will be "in-house" models developed by FAWM staff.

AI + your process

Our position is that AI-based music tools are exactly that: tools.

As with pitch correction, arranger keyboards, MIDI, sample libraries, rhyming dictionaries, or even a capo — there are varying opinions about whether using a particular tool is "cheating."

In principle, FAWM encourages you to use any tool at your disposal that helps you grow as a songwriter and a musician... and this can include AI.

What is OK

Acceptable uses of AI for FAWM include (but are not limited to):

  • AI to generate titles, ideas, story arcs, partial lyrics, or audio that you significantly edit, modify, re-arrange, or re-perform
  • AI vocal plugins if your are 100% unwilling or unable to sing
  • AI instruments (smart synthesizers, plugins that use AI to generate instrumental tracks in a larger arrangement, etc.)
  • AI tools to augment lyrics or audio that you make yourself (candidate lyrics for a second verse or bridge, altering the gender of a vocal take, etc.)
  • Automated mixing/mastering assistants to improve audio quality in your demos

Info

FAWM intends to develop more new "computational creativity" tools and expand muse.fawm.org.

Our philosophy is to make interactive tools to help you start or develop musical and lyrical ideas, rather than "end-to-end" AI music creation bots.

What is not OK

FAWM is a creative challenge for humans. We expect fawmers to act honestly.

Unacceptable uses of AI for FAWM include (but are not limited to):

  • AI software as a "push-button" solution to increase your song count
  • Letting AI create lyrics or audio that you pass off as your own
  • Using FAWM as a platform for "deep fakes" of music in the likeness of another artist

Disclosure liner notes

Anyone using AI-based tools should explain how you used them in the "liner notes" section of their song posts and perhaps use appropriate hashtags (#ai, #chatgpt, etc.).

In fact, we encourage fawmers to discuss any and all tools (AI or otherwise) used in the liner notes, so that fellow fawmers can learn from your process!

The bottom line

FAWM has seen a growing split within the community over the use of tools like ChatGPT, Suno, Udio, and the like. The capabilities of publicly-available AI-based products for generating lyrics, music, and even entire audio tracks will only continue to grow.

There is an invisible line where, on the one side you use AI as a legitimate tool, and on the other side it is a crutch. FAWM cannot tell you where that line is, but we ask you to reflect on how you engage with such tools when participating in our songwriting challenges.

Copyright is probably the murkiest and most controversial topic in generative AI and art.

Tip

For a good primer, we recommend this testimony from one of @burr's research colleagues to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on AI and Intellectual Property.

We ask that you remain focused on original songs or compositions that are yours, and that you represent to be your own, for the purposes of FAWM challenges.

What we will remove

FAWM will remove any media that violates copyright per our existing copyright policy.

Furthermore, we reserve the right to remove any content that uses AI to try and represent the likeness (including the voice) of another artist or copyrighted work/entity (e.g., "deep fakes"). While one can make the argument that such works are part of one’s own creative practice, there are also many other outlets on the Internet for such things, so why post them to FAWM?

Your songs and AI training

If you are concerned about your music or lyrics being scraped by bots to train generative AI systems, we made two changes in 2023:

  • FAWM has implemented the noai directive (info here) on all pages of fawm.org. This tells bots not to crawl or cache FAWM pages for training AI systems. These directives work on the honor system, however, and developers of AI systems may not follow protocol, so...

  • We have a privacy feature for accounts that requires viewers to be logged in to see your profile by default. (You may change this in account Settings). This is also the default setting for posting new songs, and all forums now require viewers to be logged in. This is a step we've taken to try and make FAWM songwriting events more of a safe space for musical exploration and experimentation.