The Fight to Protect Music in the Age of AI In a small studio in Georgia, surrounded by the hum of high-powered GPUs and the faint glow of solar panels, musician and technologist Benn Jordan is waging a quiet war. For over 25 years, Jordan has carved out a living as an independent artist, releasing music under various pseudonyms and building a loyal following. But in recent years, the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has threatened the very foundation of his craft. Tech companies, armed with billions in venture capital, have been scraping music from platforms like Spotify and YouTube, using it to train AI models that generate derivative tracks—often without the consent of the original artists. For Jordan, this wasn’t just an ethical violation; it was a direct assault on his livelihood. “I still enjoy making music all the time,” he says in a YouTube video that has garnered over 600,000 views, “but I have entirely stopped releasing it.” Jordan’s response to this cris...
Media Freedom, Pirate Radio & The Digital Revolution. Now a place where I'll post articles about subjects I find interesting. Originally a blog about running a Pirate Radio Station in Boulder Colorado, USA from early 2000 to early 2005 when the FCC finally shut Boulder Free Radio (KBFR) down.