Your Favourite New YouTube And Spotify Bands May Not Exist

Fake Artists, Songs, And Even Full Albums Are Not Being Labelled As AI Generated

Forget the lousy rates your favourite artist gets for every Spotify play; what about the possible disappointment you would feel finding out they don’t even exist?  Spain’s newspaper El Pais found an entire fake album on YouTube titled Rumba Congo, and it lacked any labelling which would indicate to listeners that the album was generated by an AI.  This example, and others that exist are not songs created by a real artist with AI assistance during the creative process but were completely and totally AI generated.  Researchers speculate that this will become a huge income stream for services like YouTube and Spotify, estimating somewhere in the neighbourhood of $4 billion of income by 2028.  That would represent around 20% of the total revenue for those businesses and one assumes a fair amount of income for whomever provided the AI prompt.

YouTube says they may label AI-generated content if they become aware of it, or completely remove it altogether but as of yet lack any official policy.  Spotify, on the other hand, seem enamoured of AI generated music, with or without the help of a human artist and only plan on enforcing copyright infringements; other than that caveat they welcome this sort of content.  Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s co-president and chief product & technology officer does make a distinction between AI enhanced music and purely artificial music so there is some hope we might see some sort of labelling in the future, but you shouldn’t hold your breath.

Will the next arms race be the development of ways to block AI generated content, similar to ad blockers now?  Do you even care if your content was created by someone with actual talent or are you fine with music, regardless of it’s source, as long as you love the beat?