- Sony Music recovers more than 135,000 deepfakes impersonating its biggest artists
- This includes artists like Beyoncé, Harry Styles and Bad Bunny
- Industry giants are now asking music platforms to clearly label AI-generated content
The battle between top music streaming services and AI-generated slops is still an ongoing conflict, and now Sony Music is getting in on the action: It has removed more than 135,000 deepfake songs from some of its most famous artists.
According to the music giant, the generative AI deepfakes were created to impersonate many of its biggest artists, including Harry Styles, Beyoncé and Queen, with other artists such as Miley Cyrus and Bad Bunny potentially affected. This figure was revealed during the launch of the Global Music Report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) earlier this week.
In a statement released to the BBC, Sony’s president of global digital business Dennis Kooker detailed the damage these deepfakes can cause, sharing: “In the worst case scenario, (deepfakes) can potentially damage a streaming campaign or tarnish an artist’s reputation.”
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Artist reputation aside, fraudulent AI slops cause enormous damage to an artist’s financial gains. Kooker added: “This is where deepfakes reach their worst: they rely on and profit from the demand created by the artist (and) ultimately harm what the artist is trying to accomplish.” But the numbers also reveal how quickly AI flaws and fraudulent flows are increasing.
Although Sony removed the 135,000 tracks identified by the AI, it is possible that this is only a portion of the AI-generated content uploaded to Spotify and Apple Music. Apparently, Sony Music has reported around 60,000 songs falsely claiming to be from its artist pool since March last year, which the company also revealed in the report.
As it stands, music fans are discovering AI-generated content on streaming platforms more often than they should be, which can be attributed to the rapid development of AI models and their inexpensive accessibility. We’ve previously reported on this common issue with Spotify subscribers, but that’s not the only platform where AI drops are growing.
We’ve gotten to the point where music industry giants are now actively asking major streaming platforms to identify and report AI-generated content, but while some measures are already in place, it remains a gray area.
AI content labeling is “the next step”
In the BBC report, the company shares a quote from IFPI CEO Victoria Oakley who says, “I hate to say it, but it’s very simple to fix,” calling on music platforms to be more transparent when it comes to labeling AI-generated content. As a music enthusiast, I can say on behalf of listeners around the world that this is what we want, but even the biggest platforms have yet to think about how to effectively flag AI music.
Deezer was the first streaming giant to roll out its own AI detection tool, which explicitly labels 100% AI-generated songs, excluding them from your playlists – but the problem is, Deezer isn’t removing them from the service entirely.
Recently, Deezer shared its business results report, in which it revealed that 85% of AI-generated fraudulent feeds were demonetized using its proprietary detection technology. Like Spotify, which actively encourages users to report AI errors, Deezer recognizes that there is a distinction between songs that are 100% AI-generated and songs of which only a fraction were generated using AI for creative purposes, but this opens a dangerous loophole.
Before uploading a song to Deezer, if a creator uses AI to generate an entire song, but then makes manual edits and enhancements to it themselves, Deezer will not flag that song as AI-generated. So it’s a little tricky.
That said, Deezer’s system could be considered the most reliable compared to Apple Music, for example, which deploys its own “transparency tags.” The biggest difference with transparency tags is that Apple Music leaves the responsibility for disclosing AI content to labels and distributors, an option they can easily reject, whereas Deezer’s system leaves you no choice.
So while Deezer’s system has some slight flaws, it still presents a difference from Apple Music’s approach, as well as Spotify, which has yet to roll out AI content tags.
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