Music Services Caught Streaming AI-Generated Albums Impersonating Real Singers (bbc.com) 44
The BBC reports a growing trend in music: "for established (but not superstar) artists to be targeted by fake albums or songs that suddenly appear on their pages on Spotify and other streaming services."
Even dead musicians have had AI-generated "new" material added to their catalogues... According to music industry analysts Luminate, about 99,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services every day, usually via dozens of distribution services, which ask the uploader to submit the artist's details. If that information is incorrect, and a song wrongly gets listed under an existing artist's name, it's down to them or their label to complain and get it removed.
Spotify took three weeks to remove fakes of folk singer/songwriter Emily Portman, according to the article, "and she still hasn't regained control of her Spotify artist profile... Considering how the streaming era has already made a big dent in many artists' incomes, Emily Portman says this affair has felt like a "very low blow"... She suspects independent artists are being targeted because star names have more protection and more power to get fraudulent releases removed swiftly."
But it's also happened to "a number of Americana and folk-rock artists who have had fake tracks posted using their names in recent weeks — apparently all from the same source," including Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, J Tillman (now known as Father John Misty), Sam Beam (aka Iron & Wine), Teddy Thompson and Jakob Dylan: All the releases used the same style of AI artwork and were credited to three record labels, two with apparently Indonesian names. Many listed the same name as a songwriter — Zyan Maliq Mahardika. That name has also been credited on other songs mimicking real US Christian musicians and metalcore bands. Spotify said it had flagged the issue with the distributor and removed these tracks as they "violated our policy against impersonating another person or brand." It added it would "remove any distributor who repeatedly allows this type of content on our platform"....
Tatiana Cirisano from media and technology analysis company Midia Research says AI is "making it easier for fraudsters" to fool listeners, who are also more "passive" in the algorithmic age. She thinks bad actors posing as real-life artists are hoping their fraudulent tracks will "rack up enough streams" — hundreds of thousands — to earn them a nice payday. "I would think that the AI fakes are targeting lesser-known artists in the hopes that their schemes fly under the radar, compared to if they were to target a superstar who could immediately get Spotify on the line," she notes.
But streaming services and distributors are "working hard" and getting better at spotting it, she stresses, "ironically, also by using AI and machine learning!
Spotify took three weeks to remove fakes of folk singer/songwriter Emily Portman, according to the article, "and she still hasn't regained control of her Spotify artist profile... Considering how the streaming era has already made a big dent in many artists' incomes, Emily Portman says this affair has felt like a "very low blow"... She suspects independent artists are being targeted because star names have more protection and more power to get fraudulent releases removed swiftly."
But it's also happened to "a number of Americana and folk-rock artists who have had fake tracks posted using their names in recent weeks — apparently all from the same source," including Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, J Tillman (now known as Father John Misty), Sam Beam (aka Iron & Wine), Teddy Thompson and Jakob Dylan: All the releases used the same style of AI artwork and were credited to three record labels, two with apparently Indonesian names. Many listed the same name as a songwriter — Zyan Maliq Mahardika. That name has also been credited on other songs mimicking real US Christian musicians and metalcore bands. Spotify said it had flagged the issue with the distributor and removed these tracks as they "violated our policy against impersonating another person or brand." It added it would "remove any distributor who repeatedly allows this type of content on our platform"....
Tatiana Cirisano from media and technology analysis company Midia Research says AI is "making it easier for fraudsters" to fool listeners, who are also more "passive" in the algorithmic age. She thinks bad actors posing as real-life artists are hoping their fraudulent tracks will "rack up enough streams" — hundreds of thousands — to earn them a nice payday. "I would think that the AI fakes are targeting lesser-known artists in the hopes that their schemes fly under the radar, compared to if they were to target a superstar who could immediately get Spotify on the line," she notes.
But streaming services and distributors are "working hard" and getting better at spotting it, she stresses, "ironically, also by using AI and machine learning!
The only valuable Intellectual Property (Score:2)
I am not a big fan of so called Intellectual "Property".
Copyright, Patents, and Trade Secret ranking pretty low on my list.
I am willing to give up my claims to Copyright, Patents, and Trade Secret in exchange for ignoring anyone else's claims.
However, I like Trademark going both ways, and is the the only valuable Intellectual Property I respect.
I want to know who created what part of something, and I like credit for something I got out first.
I want the opportunity to reward the creator if I want, and to be
Yeah but are you willing to give that up (Score:3, Insightful)
So that's kind of a problem. We live in a competitive society not a cooperative one.
So you have to have some kind of intellectual property because anyone creating anything needs to be able to monetize it in order to compete for food and shelter.
If you're an American especially in older one this seems pretty okay because you've probably made out pretty well. Own a house, probably a big car or truck, you've got savings and you ge
Re: (Score:2)
If you think there is a sufficient market for something that currently isn't being served, you should enter that market and make trillions.
Just think about it.
You could be the KING of cool, weird movies like they had in the 70s and 80s!! So hop to it!! Start making your first trillion today!!!
With what capital? (Score:2)
But let's say I get past the high interest rates, the bank is going to look at my business plan and they are going to question how likely is it that Facebook is just going to run me out of business or buy me out.
If not Facebook then replace them with what
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I didn't count it up, but looks like a billion excuses on why you can't.
If banks thought there was money in whatever your idea is, they would be happy to back your play.
Oh shoot you're right (Score:2)
The cult of personal responsibility is going to get us all killed or worse.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. We wouldn't want anyone responsible for their own actions or anything. That would be silly. There is always someone else to pin the blame on.
Re: (Score:2)
First off I would have to have a bank willing to loan me to Capital to do that.
Not really. You can start with a GPU, which you almost certainly already have. That would be enough to test and debug your model.
You can rent GPU time online by the minute. You can leverage open-source models. You'd need very little money to get started. Then bootstrap from there.
Dude this isn't 1980 (Score:2)
I am depressingly probably in the top 20% of intelligence in America. That is not a high bar.
But an open source model isn't going to be any good. How in the hell is my 8-year-old GPU going to compete with the tens of thousands of 5090s that Facebook is bringing to bear.
And let's just say for a second that I get hit with some cosmic rays and I'm suddenly 100 IQ points smarter. So that I can do the advanced mat
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You get the benefits of all the advances humanity has made before you got here. That's a pretty good deal!!!
It's the Stone Age people that got screwed. They missed out on all this shit because they were born too early.
Re: (Score:2)
Every time we start to get a little more advanced than that they will send drones to bomb us into pulp so that we can't challenge their power and authority.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Doom and gloom.
Be glad to be alive and bitch less.
Live in short. Be happy with what you've got.
That kind of starving kids in China BS (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you spent as much time engaged in productive economic activity as you do developing delusional conspiracy theories, you'd be the planet's first trillionaire.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah. I'm willing to give up my useless shit if people will give up their valuable shit. Because I'm generous that way.
Give me a break.
Jezzz.
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Trademarks are sometimes abused, but they are not useless. They let people know what the source of something is when combined with the year of its production. They are also valuable to the owners in and of themselves if they are protected, because people purchase things based on them.
Re: (Score:2)
The two other responses also attempted to assert that my so called intellectual "property" is worth less than other intellectual "property"; and therefore that is why it is not very meaningful for me to push for abolishing Copyright, Patents, and Trade Secrets based on the golden rule. But I think your response highlights the problem with this counter argument the most, is the most concise, and most importantly your other contributions in this discussion entice me to solicit more from you.
Your response seem
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Like you - I, too, am willing to give up my claims to my 1993 Ford Escort Wagon in exchange for being able to take and drive any Lamborghini I choose.
So called Intellectual "Property" != Property (Score:2)
The two responses before you both attempted to assert that my so called intellectual "property" is worth less than other intellectual "property"; and therefore that is why it is not very meaningful for me to push for abolishing Copyright, Patents, and Trade Secrets based on the golden rule. I think there is an interesting discussion to be had there.
However, you had an interesting analogy that on the surface illustrates the repeated response point of my so called intellectual "property" not being as valuable
Was Buddy Bolden prescient? (Score:2)
What if he didn't like the idea of using the threat of state violence to defend copyright, because he lived in New Orleans when state violence was suspended in the Storyville district and he liked the freedom, so he just didn't record to keep others from stealing his licks?
Sounding similar (Score:5, Interesting)
Is not impersonating.
After Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR) split in 1972, John Fogerty was sued by Fantasy Records, which held the rights to CCR's catalog. The label’s boss, Saul Zaentz, claimed that Fogerty's 1984 solo song “The Old Man Down the Road” sounded too much like CCR’s “Run Through the Jungle” — a song Fogerty himself wrote and sang in 1970.
Zaentz’s logic? Fogerty was plagiarizing himself.
Re:Sounding similar (Score:4, Informative)
"Sounding similar Is not impersonating."
This is about songs being posted as if they were productions by the artists in question. The summary says so, no need to RTFA.
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It's a case of RTFS then.:-)
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Unless TFS is impersonating another summary, because then *HEAD SPLODED*
Royalties get paid to no-one with AI music, right? (Score:3)
The streaming service does not have an interest in preventing AI songs from being played, they don't have to pay royalties on the plays to the simulated artist without a lengthy and costly court battle.
1. Person listens to an AI generated song sung by an AI voice similar to (famous deceased artist)
2. Royalties would be paid to the artist's estate would be $0.01 for example
3. AI song, not owned by the artist's estate, no claim on the royalty money
4. Royalty money is kept by the streaming service
End result, r
FFS this has nothing to do with sound (Score:2)
Is not impersonating.
This is saying "Impersonated artist X" is the author of an album and being posted under that artist's catalogue. It is literally impersonation in every possible definition of the word: claiming you're someone else. This has nothing at all to do with the sound or the music. In many cases the impersonated music doesn't even match the damn genre.
Re: FFS this has nothing to do with sound (Score:2)
Algorithmic spam music predates modern machine learning too. All it has to do is sound inoffensive enough that you don't notice if it slips into the right kind of playlist. For playlists not listened to by conscious, adult humans (e.g. baby or sleep playlists) it's very easy to slip in.
There's probably a lot of intersection between (Score:3)
those people who think artists are no longer needed because of this, and those people who have a psychotic break after a chat GPT update reduces their daily intake of warmth and familiarity
Such a surprise (Score:3)
And, who goes to prison? Nobody? As expected. "AI" is all about stealing stuff these days.
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This is more trademark violation, or possibly malicious impersonation. I can't recall anyone ever defending "pretending to be someone so you can get paid as if your work was theirs"....except...well, there was El Mir, of course. That's pretty similar. And I have known folks who defended El Mir. (But in his case people saw what they were buying before they paid.)
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Prove your statement. Show me one instance were I posted anything like that here. Also show evidence for me being a "leftist".
If you do not manage that, then you are just a lying sack of shit.
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who goes to prison? Nobody?
Nobody goes to jail because the uploaders are doing it from very far away countries and nobody is going to make the effort to sue them there. Also Spotify did remove the offending songs, even if reluctantly. There's no law that says Spotify had to remove the songs faster than they did or they go to jail.
What am I missing here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Short of identity theft or SIM cloning, shouldn't it be fairly simple for the platform to contact the true owner of the artist account when new tracks are uploaded? When music is posted under an artist's name, couldn't Spotify's servers automatically reach out to the artist with details of the upload, and then await confirmation from the artist before allowing the upload to be streamed?
I don't use any music streaming services so I may be missing something that's obvious to more knowledgeable folks. But I do know that the technology to do this exists, and I find it hard to believe that setting up such a confirmation process would be prohibitively expensive.
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shouldn't it be fairly simple for the platform to contact the true owner of the artist account when new tracks are uploaded?
Of course it would be simple (in most cases). The problem is Spotify has become same as Amazon in massifying their product. Allowing anyone to sell upload/anything without any human check enables Spotify to maximize their profit. It does not matter if that harm their reputation. Look at Amazon and the problem of bait-and-switch fake products, fake branded products, fake reviews... Like anyone and their dog can open a S0ny or K1ngston shop on Amazon, from the point of view of Spotify, it's totally reasonable
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Short of identity theft or SIM cloning, shouldn't it be fairly simple for the platform to contact the true owner of the artist account when new tracks are uploaded?
The problem is listed right there in the summary. 99000 songs per day. That's a lot of contacting. How many millions of dollars per year are you going to pay to cover the salary of the people tasked with contacting the artists?
Re: What am I missing here? (Score:2)
That's paid by the artists already, to services like CDBaby. They're supposed to do some minimal vetting, and Spotify is supposed to kick them out if they don't.
The problem is a lot of shady stuff is even legal (e.g. compilation albums), and it's neither in Spotify or the service's economic interest to actually be strict about this.
Which is maybe why Spotify fired the guy who did most of the spam prevention, Glenn McDonald.
Are they the living or the dead performers (Score:2)
This is a serious question.
Read this before (Score:2)