Does Ethical AI Exist?

Think ethical AI is a contradiction in terms? These companies are trying to change that perception by introducing licensing and transparency into music AI. But is it too little, too late?

It’s scary being a musician in 2025. Artificial intelligence may be helping in some ways, as with mixing and mastering plugins, but in many other ways, it can feel like a tidal wave about to engulf our careers. The generative AI music boom is the biggest concern right now, with “artists” like the Velvet Sundown garnering streaming plays and press alike, taking away royalties and attention from human musicians. 

The Velvet Sundown – a 100% AI generated “band”

There’s also the ongoing issue of AI companies scraping data from copyrighted material without consent. Anthropic AI recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a group of authors, a settlement that encompasses more than 500,000 books. On the music side, Billboard recently revealed that Google, Microsoft, Meta, X, and OpenAI have brazenly scraped copyright-protected music from millions of artists and songwriters, including The Beatles, The Weekend, and many more, calling it “the largest IP theft in music history.”

Of course, the kicker here is that anyone can fire up a generative AI service website and make an original “song” that’s really just an amalgamation of stolen intellectual property, and then upload it to streaming services. While this is financially upsetting, there’s also a psychological and even existential toll. Music producers and songwriters struggling to make a career in music are losing out to artists that don’t even exist. Listeners are affected as well. Although some may not care that the music they’re enjoying is AI, many others are essentially being hoodwinked into thinking they’re supporting a new band when it’s really just bots and scammers.

Ethical Alternative: Are There “Good Guys” In The AI Industry?

This is how people must have felt watching cars roll out in the early 20th century. Pedestrian deaths increased, systems changed drastically, and the pace of life was suddenly changed. Thankfully, governments stepped in to set guidelines and create new infrastructure to shape the new flow of traffic. This is how AI must play out, but to get to the point where things run smoothly and it doesn’t feel like an attack on our livelihoods, we need more people actively working to rein in AI. Less “move fast and break things” and more transparency and trust.

Here’s the big question then: Can so-called ethical players change the standards before exploitative practices dominate, or is this purely just fluff? Is ethical AI the stuff of good intentions, but ultimately too little too late? Those that ensure AI-generated works don’t improperly compete with human work, who properly license data and operate with transparency, have their work cut out for them.

Navigating Regulation: Transparent Audio

Although it may not look like it from the ground, AI regulations are starting to happen globally. These are not standardized yet, though, with different locations having unique requirements. As regulations like the EU AI Act and California AI Transparency Act come into effect in 2026, generative AI outfits will need to make sure they’re in compliance. One way they can do that is by working with a company like Transparent Audio.

What these and other acts are requiring is AI transparency, the inclusion of metadata that identifies a piece of digital content as being AI-generated. Sometimes called AI content identification, you can think of it as a digital fingerprint for AI creations, enabling companies, users, and regulators to pinpoint the origin and authenticity of the piece of music.

Content generators can use the company’s TransparentMeta to embed verifiable metadata into an audio file to prove whether it is AI-generated. This not only allows the company to remain compliant with regulations but also enables platforms and listeners to identify whether a piece of music or speech is AI or not. Back when the Velvet Sundown thing was happening, a big part of the story was confusion over whether it was a real band or not. With metadata in place, there will no longer be any doubt. 

Find out more.

A New Revenue-Sharing System: Beatoven.ai

We’re most familiar with generative AI outfits that create songs based on data illegally scraped from copyrighted material, as this is what appears in headlines, but it’s not the only way to do it. Beatoven.ai is a soundtrack-focused generative AI company that uses ethically sourced datasets to power its generative engine, which uses prompts to create background music for films, YouTube, and video games.

Beatoven.ai’s datasets come via its Maestro generative AI foundation model, reportedly the first to be fully licensed and fairly trained from the start. Built on official partnerships with rights holders, it offers ongoing revenue sharing with artists, much like a record label would. To do this, it works with a rights management platform called Musical AI. This also includes a revenue-sharing system that pays the artists and composers when their music   data is used to generate songs.

Beatoven.ai maintains the rights to the music created by users, who then get a non-exclusive perpetual license to use the track. You also can’t upload it to a streamer as you’re not the owner. Of course, every track is also imprinted with the appropriate metadata, ensuring transparency.

Find out more here.

Artist Compensation: Kits AI

From a producer’s perspective, music-related AI can often feel like a tech bro cash grab, an attempt at lining their own pockets by taking creativity away from musicians. While the way that you feel about AI vocals in music may depend on whether you’re a vocalist or not, it’s good to know that there are companies that are at least paying the people whose voices they’re cloning.

Kits AI is one such company. Although it offers a variety of AI-powered music services from mastering to AI musical instruments, Kits’ main focus is vocals, with voice changers, voice cloning, and a vocal generator all available. Rather than stealing the source vocals, though, Kits works directly with artists to ethically source the data. This involves a contract plus an agreement so that the artist understands what the use of their voice entails. There are also dynamic revenue-sharing models that compensate the vocalists based on how their material is used.

Find out more here.

AI Composition With Rights Transparency: Muzaic

You may not know the name Muzaic, but if you use Canva or BigVu to generate videos, you’ve likely experienced its background music generator. Muzaic generates AI soundtracks from within the video editing applications, tailoring the tempo and length to the content in the video based on genre and mood prompts. 

What’s good for content creators is that the resulting track will be copyright-free, meaning no strikes against you on YouTube or other sites. What’s good for the industry is the sourcing of the data, which Muzaic assures is legal. “No copyrights were broken in the making of this product,” it says on its website.

Find out more here.

Towards An Ethical AI Future

While it’s admirable for these companies to establish codes of conduct and best practices, you have to wonder if it will be worth it in the end. Without proper governmental oversight around the world, the actions of a few companies may not be strong enough to hold back a tidal wave of unethical actors, particularly when superintelligent AI comes online.

How AI will ultimately upend existing technological and cultural systems remains to be seen. One thing that is for sure, however, is that it will become more and more integrated into our lives. Hopefully, more companies will do the right thing and adopt the kinds of best practices for AI that ensure it becomes beneficial to everyone, and not just big technology companies – or even just to itself.

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Written by The DJ Sessions