AI music: The fake artists filling up playlists

The “AI slopification of music” is here, said Ece Yildirim in Gizmodo. It’s gotten so difficult to decipher which songs are human-made and which are synthetically produced by artificial intelligence that Spotify, the world’s largest audio-streaming service, announced recently it’s going to append a “verification badge” on trusted artists’ pages. It stopped short, however, of an AI ban. That would have hurt outfits like the Velvet Sundown—an indie band that garnered millions of streams on Spotify last summer. Fans later learned that the group was “completely AI-generated,” including a phony album cover featuring the smiling faces of four fake members. Another music streaming platform, Deezer, reported recently that “44% of its daily uploads were AI-generated songs,” and an “overwhelming majority of people couldn’t tell AI-generated music apart from songs written and performed by actual humans.” Humans have been making music for 35,000 years. But AI could be about to end our run.

Billboard allowing fake artists on its charts isn’t helping, said Peter A. Berry in Bloomberg. For 113 years, the music and entertainment brand has served as an “institutional gatekeeper,” and its rankings were always a “competition between human beings and the limits they naturally possess.” But in November, Billboard opened its hallowed charts to nonhumans for the first time, allowing streams of songs by AI performers like country music act Breaking Rust and R&B singer Xania Monet to count alongside Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. If Billboard wants to create a separate chart for AI creations, fine. But humans shouldn’t be “competing against machines” that can “generate abilities that aren’t naturally there.”

“The flood of AI music shows no signs of abating,” said Terrence O’Brien in The Verge, and it won’t as long as platforms keep allowing it. “In survey after survey, public opinion toward AI music is pretty unfavorable,” with people most worried about synthetic artists degrading the music. But “companies are hesitant to penalize AI use in part because they expect it to become a standard tool in the industry” as more artists start to incorporate it into their creative processes in some form.

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Eventually, it will be impossible to separate music-based AI use, said Nathan Brackett in Rolling Stone. Because “behind closed doors,” AI tools are “creeping into the workflows of top producers, songwriters, and artists.” Mikey Shulman, CEO of AI music creation platform Suno, compares it to Ozempic: “Everybody is on it, and nobody wants to talk about it.” Most musicians aren’t using AI to generate entire songs from scratch. But producers will, for example, “make funk and soul samples out of AI, rather than license original music or hire musicians.” And that means “for every task that AI streamlines, there might be someone” who used to fill that role “who isn’t paid anymore.”