“It’s my empire and I call the shots”, Nicki Minaj once sang.

But now the rapper and scores of other musicians are warning that that is no longer the case.

An alliance of musicians that ranges from Billie Eilish to Smokey Robinson is protesting against the “sabotaging” of creativity by AI developers and music platforms.

A letter signed by scores of artists, including REM and the estates of Frank Sinatra and Bob Marley, says companies are trying to replace “the work of human artists with massive quantities of AI-created ‘sounds’ and ‘images’”.

This would “substantially dilute the royalty pools that are paid out to artists”. They add: “For many working musicians, artists and songwriters who are just trying to make ends meet, this would be catastrophic.

“This assault on human creativity must be stopped,” the artists, who also include Elvis Costello and Katy Perry, wrote, adding that the entire “music ecosystem” was at risk of destruction.

The music industry’s fears about the rise of AI have grown over the past year, with some platforms, including China’s Tencent Music, having been found to be hosting hundreds of songs with AI-generated vocals.

In March last year The Times reported the concerns of Michael Nash, an executive with Universal Music Group, that AI models were being “trained on vast quantities of copyrighted content … and they’re not providing any compensation to the people who produce that indispensable source material”.

In the annual Global Music Report, Nash wrote: “The bottom line is a lot of AI developers are just ignoring the ethics of ingesting the creative work of others.”

Some AI-powered music creation apps have attempted to upload thousands of songs onto platforms such as Spotify. There have also been claims that, before they were removed, some of the songs had the number of streams manipulated to provide more royalties for their creators.

In the letter published this week by the Artist Rights Alliance, the signatories said they believed that when “used responsibly AI has enormous potential to advance human creativity”.

They add: “Unfortunately some platforms and developers are employing AI to sabotage creativity and undermine artists, musicians and rightsholders.

“Unchecked, AI will set in motion a race to the bottom that will degrade the value of our work and prevent us from being fairly compensated for it. This assault on human creativity must be stopped.”

Almost all the creative industries are being affected by AI. Last year’s strikes in North America that brought film and television production to a halt was prompted, in part, by fears about the use of AI in script generation. There are also concerns that studios will use the technology to produce images of actors and entertainers.

Several lawsuits have been filed against companies such as OpenAI over allegations they have used the copyrighted works of writers and musicians to train their AI models.

Many artists have, however, entered partnerships with AI companies such as Vocalist AI, which allows users to upload a recording of their own voice and have it transformed into that of a singer or rapper who has collaborated with the platform.

One of its creators, Andrew Frampton, said there was a “growing sense within the creator economy that the future will belong to those who supplement their songwriting and production with AI tools”.

The open letter said that every company involved in the growth sector had responsibilities to protect creators. The signatories wrote: “We call on all AI developers, technology companies, platforms and digital music services to pledge that they will not develop or deploy AI music-generation technology, content or tools that undermine or replace the human artistry of songwriters and artists or deny us fair compensation for our work.”