Trapped Animal's Stance on Ai generated music and art:

Trapped Animal is a record label that champions human-made art.

AI is a new technology revolutionising the world. We at Trapped Animal are not Luddites; we embrace new technology and tools that might make production, admin, finances and knowledge growth more accessible.

We are also stewards for our artists' intellectual property.

There are a few core actors in the AI industry right now, all working to build, grow and outsmart their peers, to get there first. This is somewhat like the nuclear race in the early days: the technology has great capacity for good and perhaps even greater capacity for bad.

We've spent some time researching how LLMs and tools that generate music and visual art have been trained. Presently, we see many songs from our catalogue were scraped without permission by various organisations and sometimes just given away on the internet for AI companies to use to train their AIs.

We've spoken to partners in the indie world and at this present time we see no signs of a financial compensation to the millions of artists whose work has been used to train models that can artificially generate whole songs, video, prose and pictures.

Until we understand how artists and humanity will be "made whole" by the AI industry's use of IP, we stand apart from it.

We strongly believe in exercising caution with AI development and rollout, both for economical and environmental reasons, and at present we are seeing very little from the powers that be to calm our concerns on this side of things.