YouTube announces AI music principles, launches incubator with UMG

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan outlined the principles and his vision on how the framework will enhance creative expression while also protecting artists on the platform, starting with YouTube’s commitment to embracing AI in collaboration with other industry partners to promote bold and responsible innovation within the space.

“Today, ​​AI is moving at a pace faster than ever before. It’s empowering creativity, sparking new ideas, and even transforming industries,” Mohan said. “At this critical inflection point, it’s clear that we need to boldly embrace this technology with a continued commitment to responsibility. With that in mind, over the past few months I’ve spent time talking with AI experts working across YouTube as well as leaders in one of the most influential and creative forces in the world: the music industry.”

“Now, we’re working closely with our music partners, including Universal Music Group [UMG], to develop an AI framework to help us work toward our common goals. These three fundamental AI principles serve to enhance music’s unique creative expression while also protecting music artists and the integrity of their work.”

The YouTube AI principles, as explained by Mohan, are:

• Principle 1: AI is here, and we will embrace it responsibly together with our music partners. As generative AI unlocks ambitious new forms of creativity, YouTube and our partners across the music industry agree to build on our long collaborative history and responsibly embrace this rapidly advancing field. 
• Principle 2: AI is ushering in a new age of creative expression, but it must include appropriate protections and unlock opportunities for music partners who decide to participate. We’re continuing our strong track record of protecting the creative work of artists on YouTube. We’ve made massive investments over the years in the systems that help balance the interests of copyright holders with those of the creative community on YouTube.
• Principle 3: We’ve built an industry-leading trust and safety organisation and content policies. We will scale those to meet the challenges of AI. We spent years investing in the policies and trust and safety teams that help protect the YouTube community, and we’re also applying these safeguards to AI-generated content. Generative AI systems may amplify current challenges like trademark and copyright abuse, misinformation, spam, and more. But AI can also be used to identify this sort of content, and we’ll continue to invest in the AI-powered technology that helps us protect our community of viewers, creators, artists and songwriters – from content ID to policies and detection and enforcement systems that keep our platform safe behind the scenes. And we commit to scaling this work even further.

The announcement also introduced YouTube’s AI Music Incubator, a programme that will bring together some of today’s most innovative artists, songwriters, and producers to help inform YouTube’s approach to generative AI in music. The incubator will kick off with a genre-spanning cohort of creatives from UMG.

UMG chairman and CEO Lucian Grainge, who helped shape the principles, said: “Our challenge and opportunity as an industry is to establish effective tools, incentives and rewards – as well as rules of the road – that enable us to limit AI’s potential downside while promoting its promising upside. If we strike the right balance, I believe AI will amplify human imagination and enrich musical creativity in extraordinary new ways.”

He added: “Our enduring faith in human creativity is the bedrock of Universal Music Group’s collaboration with YouTube on the future of AI. Central to our collective vision is taking steps to build a safe, responsible and profitable ecosystem of music and video – one where artists and songwriters have the ability to maintain their creative integrity, their power to choose, and to be compensated fairly.

“Our partnership is building on that foundation with a shared commitment to lead responsibly, as outlined in YouTube’s AI principles, where Artificial Intelligence is built to empower human creativity and not the other way around. AI will never replace human creativity because it will always lack the essential spark that drives the most talented artists to do their best work, which is intention.”