Legendary musician urges artists to be original

The founder of Tumbuna Tracks, a music recording company in Madang, is encouraging aspiring musicians in the country to write their own songs instead of using Artificial Intelligence [AI] to recreate other musicians’ songs.

Christian Seeto, the man behind the success of Tumbuna Tracks from the 1980s to early 2000; expressed this recently whilst sharing his views on the use of AI in the music industry in Papua New Guinea.

“As an industry, as artists, singers who are out there; we are totally against people taking our music, taking our production and putting it into AI and reproducing new copies. That’s already an infringement of the software that they are using,” he said.

“You need to put in music that is yours. But people are going in and getting our recordings, Tumbuna Tracks recordings, our artists’ recordings and putting it into AI and creating a new version."

He said that whilst it is good, the bad part is they don’t own the particular music that they are reproducing.

Seeto said AI is a great tool but if anyone wants to use it, they must use it on their own material.

He also admits that as a song writer and producer, he likes to use AI. However; he uses it on his own material, on something he has written and that will cost him a lot of money to produce.

“Now it’s easy, I can produce it using Artificial Intelligence,” he said. “AI is true but use it on your own material. Don’t go and infringe and take somebody else’s work and use it. You are disrespecting them, you are disrespecting their creativity, their hard work."

Seeto encouraged music producers to maintain their original artwork as musicians.

“There is no originality in reproducing someone else’s song. When you write a song yourself, it comes from your soul. And when somebody takes it and reproduce it, there is no originality in it. But if you write something and ask AI to produce it for you, of course.”

The Tumbuna Tracks legend revealed he has several songs that people have reproduced using AI, and he is not too happy about it.

“I could reproduce them myself again but because people have really spoilt some of our songs, I am not interested. I am just going ahead and writing new materials but using that technology.

“I support all the artists that are coming out, but again my message is please, Papua New Guinea, respect the artist, respect their hard work, respect their creativity, the song writing and let them produce it themselves if they want to.

“What I am doing now is, songs I write, I register, I copyright them. Even though I am producing my new songs using AI, I’m still registering them as they are my creativity,” Seeto added.