- Sony Music removes more than 135,000 deepfakes that impersonate its biggest artists
- This includes acts like Beyoncé, Harry Styles and Bad Bunny.
- Now industry giants are asking music platforms to clearly label AI-generated content.
The battle between top music streaming services and AI-generated trash remains an ongoing conflict, and now Sony Music is getting involved: it has removed more than 135,000 deepfake songs from some of its most famous artists.
According to the music giant, the AI generative deepfakes were created to impersonate a number of its biggest artists, including Harry Styles, Beyoncé and Queen, and other artists such as Miley Cyrus and Bad Bunny could be affected. This figure was revealed at the launch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) World Music Report earlier this week.
In a statement issued to the BBC, Sony’s president of global digital business Dennis Kooker detailed the damage these deepfakes can cause, sharing: “At worst, (deepfakes) potentially damage a release campaign or tarnish an artist’s reputation.”
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Artist reputation aside, fraudulent AI waste causes enormous damage to an artist’s financial earnings. Kooker added: “That’s when deepfakes are at their worst: they take advantage and profit from the demand the artist has created (and) ultimately detract from what the artist is trying to achieve.” But the figures also reveal how quickly AI and fraudulent flows are increasing.
Although Sony has removed the 135,000 tracks identified by AI, it is possible that this is just a portion of the AI-generated content that is uploaded to sites like Spotify and Apple Music. Sony Music apparently flagged 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 things stand, music fans are encountering AI-generated content on streaming platforms more often than they should, which can be attributed to the rapid development of AI models and their affordability. We previously reported on this common issue with Spotify subscribers, but it’s not the only platform where AI is building up.
It’s gotten to the point where music industry giants are now actively asking major streaming platforms to identify and flag AI-generated content, but while some measures are already in place, it’s still a bit of a gray area.
Labeling AI content is ‘the next step’
In the BBC report, the company shares a quote from IFPI chief executive Victoria Oakley, who says: “I hate to say it, but it’s very simple to fix,” and calls for music platforms to be more transparent when labeling AI-generated content. As a music fan, I can say on behalf of listeners around the world that this is what we want, but even the biggest platforms still haven’t figured out how to efficiently brand music with AI.
Deezer was the first streaming giant to implement its own AI detection tool, which explicitly tags 100% AI-generated songs, excluding them from its playlists, but the problem is that Deezer does not remove them from the service completely.
Recently, Deezer shared its business earnings report, where it revealed that 85% of AI-generated fraudulent streams were demonetized thanks to its proprietary detection technology. Similar to Spotify, which actively encourages users to report the demise of AI, Deezer recognizes that there is a distinction between songs that are 100% AI-generated and songs where only a fraction have been 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 a complete song but then makes changes and improvements to the manual production, Deezer will not mark that song as AI generated. So, it’s a little complicated.
That said, Deezer’s system could be seen as the most reliable compared to Apple Music, for example, which is implementing its own ‘Transparency Labels’. The biggest difference with Transparency Tags is that Apple Music leaves the responsibility of revealing AI content to labels and distributors, an option they can easily reject, while Deezer’s system gives you no other option.
So while Deezer’s system has some slight flaws, it still has an advantage over Apple Music’s approach, and also over Spotify, which has yet to implement AI content tags.
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