What on earth, SoundCloud??
"In the absence of a separate agreement that states otherwise, 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."
https://soundcloud.com/terms-of-use
via @sarahdal https://crispsandwi.ch/@sarahdal/114477755873097160
Not a very satisfying response.
"SoundCloud has never used any artist content to train AI models, nor do we develop AI tools or allow third parties to scrape or use SoundCloud-hosted content for AI training purposes. [...]
At this time, there is no opt-out mechanism available."
And another update from SoundCloud support:
"With our upcoming Terms of Use update, SoundCloud will not use your content to train generative AI models unless you’ve explicitly given consent via an opt-in mechanism.
That means by default, your content will not be used for AI training, so no action is required on your part to protect your content."
And they linked to a letter from their CEO.
https://press.soundcloud.com/249951-new-campaign-may-14-2025
"SoundCloud has never used artist content to train AI models. Not for music creation. Not for large language models. Not for anything that tries to mimic or replace your work."
I still have to ask them about this "no AI" tag, not sure if this is something I should be able to apply myself, or is perhaps being added automatically?
I think they are referring to their https://soundcloud.com/robots.txt file, which does indeed exclude some popular AI bots.
Now I'm spending my morning talking to an "AI-powered chatbot", trying to get in touch with a human to opt out of having my work be used to train AI.
Happy Friday, we live in the future!
