Spotify announced this week that it will begin labeling artists whose personas are generated by AI, a move driven by user frustration with profiles for artists that appear human but are not.
Gizmodo reports that the streaming platform said it will start applying an “AI Persona” label in mid-September to artist profiles that represent human-like characters created by algorithms rather than actual people. The announcement comes as a lack of regulation in the United States surrounding deepfakes has allowed a wave of AI artists to spread across streaming services.
“Listeners have been clear in telling us that they don’t like seeing an artist profile that seems human, only to find out that the persona is AI-generated,” the company wrote in its announcement. The new label “signals to listeners that an artist’s identity may be AI-generated and does not represent a real person.”
Spotify said the human creators behind AI personas will be able to voluntarily identify themselves through Spotify for Artists, its platform for musicians. A similar voluntary labeling system was proposed last month by a group of organizations representing musicians and record labels.
For profiles that do not self-disclose, Spotify plans to run its own review process. The company said the effort will begin “with artists who have met defined audience thresholds, so the labels cover the vast majority of artist profiles that users visit,” though it did not specify what that threshold would be.
The label carries consequences for how AI artists spread on the platform. Artists tagged as AI Personas will no longer appear in Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations by default, except in cases where a user already follows the AI-generated artist. The labels will be visible in artist banners and “About” sections, within Spotify’s search feature, and next to tracks from AI-generated artists in playlists.
Users will also be able to click on the label to see whether the creator behind an AI persona disclosed it voluntarily or was identified through Spotify’s review process, an apparent incentive for creators not to evade the system.
The AI Persona label builds on a feature Spotify introduced earlier this year called “AI credits,” which lets artists disclose when the technology was used in parts of a song’s production, such as writing lyrics. “With AI credits, we have seen that people are eager to take the opportunity to be transparent and share how they used AI as part of their song’s creative process,” Spotify wrote. “We’re hoping for a similar level of self disclosure for AI Personas.”
AI remains a divisive subject in the music industry. Many musicians view it as a threat, pointing to the use of copyrighted material to train the technology without compensation for the artists who created it. Others are open to experimenting with AI as a tool without surrendering their creative process to it entirely. For a small group of people generating significant profits from AI tracks performed by entirely fictional artists, the technology has been highly lucrative.
One example is the “artist” Enlly Blue, whose profile has just under 168,700 followers on Spotify and features a picture resembling a heavily airbrushed photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Blue’s most popular song, “Through My Soul,” debuted at number 44 on Billboard’s Emerging Artists chart in October.
Blue is not a real person. According to Billboard, the persona is a project launched by a songwriter named Thong Viet, and it has been profitable. “Through My Soul” has been streamed well over 29 million times, and that track alone has earned more than $145,000.
However, despite potential controversy, Forbes reports that AI music generator Suno has reached a licensing agreement with BMG, its second partnership with a significant music rights holder as the company prepares to launch new models trained on licensed work.
BMG Rights Management represents more than 3 million songs and publishing rights for songwriters and musicians including Rolling Stones members Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Bruno Mars, John Legend, Bebe Rexha, Pitbull, Diane Warren and Lewis Capaldi.
AI is causing significant upheavals in every area of the economy, including the music industry. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Gizmodo here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.