So the argument I'm going to put forward in this debate is that these streaming services are publishers who have the right to audit the music that is promoted on their platform in whichever way they see fit. And that it is a basic right that they have to choose to publish whatever music that they wish to publish under their own terms. And it's not like there aren't ways to mitigate against the proliferation of AI generated music. You could have, for instance, community curated playlists that are verified to be only human music. These services could also implement a toggle system that allows you to filter out music that is plausibly AI generated. But the AI sensors who are flagging the AI music are no better at determining the music than the AI is at generating the music. There is a potential risk here of accidentally flagging human music as AI because the sensors happened to make a mistake or something along these lines. And I think that the rights of publishers supersede the rights of lawmakers so long as the publishers aren't doing anything intrinsically unethical by allowing this sort of music to exist.

A big question here is one of epistemology. The question is, how do we determine whether or not a song is AI generated if we don't have direct access to the producer or their methodology? I don't really see an argument for thinking that AI detectors are necessarily going to be superior to humans in terms of being able to determine which music is created by AI and which music is created by humans. And so the flagging issue still seems to be an ethical one that the other side has to account for. So you could of course implement some sort of verification system. Some way of determining whether or not the music that you're listening to is plausibly created by an AI. There are any heuristics that you can rely upon, but no definitive way of proving with any degree of real confidence that your filtering mechanism is fair or just and doesn't discriminate against human-made music that happens to trigger the AI detection software.

In the end, though, this seems to suggest that the only real solution is to just ban all the music until we can definitively prove or verify with 100% confidence that the music that we're listening to was created by a human being. And until we can prove it, then the music should just continue to stay banned. Now, I'm only taking the logical extreme consequence of the line of thinking that you are putting forward. I'm not necessarily saying that you can't have a moderate ban on AI music, but I think that we need to be very careful in how we utilize our policy plans and what kinds of information we need. The impact that will have on the ability for freedom of expression, the ability for producers to audit and regulate their own markets, and the ability for listeners to discern for themselves what music they want to listen to and what music might be AI or not. And I just don't think that an outright ban is something that is plausibly realistic or practical at this point in time. Because AI music is a very new phenomenon, and it just doesn't seem that the AI detectors are going to be any better at detecting AI music than a fairly competent human auditor. At best. At worst, the AI will falsely flag certain human music as AI generated, and then it will create a false heuristic, and then that false heuristic will be reinforced, causing the AI to continue to ban music under that false heuristic, under the presumption that it's a reliable heuristic. And the thing that's ultimately sinister about this is that it's done in the name of filtering out fake music. But in reality, there's nothing to check and ensure that the sensors themselves are actually accurately detecting which music is phony and which isn't. So we can talk about the abstract ideas all day, but in the end, we need to consider the practical consequences and realize that we are not in a position to be able to enforce policies that not only go against the freedom of publishers to publish what they want, but actively censors human producers as an unintended side effect.