Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Soundcloud is a site where musicians can host their music. On Friday 9 May, Bluesky user Thomas Brunet noticed something in the Soundcloud terms of service: [Bluesky; Soundcloud]

You explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as input to artificial intelligence or machine intelligence technologies or services as part of and for providing the services.

Soundcloud added this new wording on 12 February 2024. It just escaped notice until now — because Soundcloud didn’t tell anyone. People checked back through their email archives and there wasn’t a word from Soundcloud about this. [Soundcloud, archive 11 Feb 2024, archive 12 Feb 2024]

The new line in the terms followed the pile of AI-related services that Soundcloud put onto the platform in January 2024. [press release]

It’s unclear if this new provision only applies to tracks uploaded from 12 February 2024 — or if Soundcloud is making an ambit claim on the decades of stuff that was already uploaded to the site.

Note that the Soundcloud terms of service page is different viewed from different countries — the AI stuff is visible in the US and the UK, but apparently not in Canada. [Bluesky]

Musicians on Bluesky and Twitter saw Soundcloud’s apparent AI land grab and went feral. They deleted their music and accounts en masse and told everyone to do the same. [Futurism]

Soundcloud frantically said some backtracking-shaped words. They swear they haven’t been training on your stuff: [Hollywood Reporter]

SoundCloud has never used artist content to train AI models, nor do we develop AI tools or allow third parties to scrape or use SoundCloud content from our platform for AI training purposes.

But the terms of service still claim open slather on all your stuff. The terms of service state that they “constitute the entire agreement between you and SoundCloud.” Sweet words in unsigned press statements don’t matter.

Maybe Soundcloud really doesn’t want to train on your stuff today. But that says nothing about tomorrow. If Soundcloud don’t want to train on your music, they need not to have terms that say they can.

Soundcloud told the press:

we implemented technical safeguards, including a “no AI” tag on our site to explicitly prohibit unauthorized use.

I went looking for this “no AI” tag. It’s not in the settings and it’s not mentioned in the support pages on the Soundcloud site. The only place that mentions a “no AI” tag is Soundcloud’s damage control in the past three days. Are you supposed to hand-tag every track with “no AI” to opt out?

Should we ever consider using user content to train generative AI models, we would introduce clear opt-out mechanisms in advance

Why the hell do we need to opt out? Why isn’t Soundcloud talking about an opt-in mechanism? Oh, you know why.

• Video version

Ich glaube zwar nicht, dass irgendeiner meiner Leser irgendwelche Illusionen hatte, wie glaubwürdig, vertrauenswürdig und verlässlich der Merz sein würde, und wie belastbar seine Versprechungen oder sogar Verträge mit ihm sein würden...

Aber trotzdem fürs Archiv:

Bei seinem Antrittsbesuch in Brüssel hat Bundeskanzler Merz entgegen dem Koalitionsvertrag nachdrücklich das Aus für die EU-Lieferkettenrichtlinie verlangt.

Was kümmern mich meine Versprechen von gestern!1!!

Michael Kalus posted a photo: