From NPR
AI-generated music is here to stay. Will streaming services like Spotify label it?
By Isabella Gomez Sarmiento
It sounds like a joke, or a bad episode of Black Mirror.
A band of four guys with shaggy hair released two albums’ worth of generic psych-rock songs back-to-back. The songs ended up on Spotify users’ Discover Weekly feeds, as well as on third-party playlists boasting hundreds of thousands of followers. Within a few weeks, the band’s music had garnered millions of streams — except the band wasn’t real. It was a “synthetic music project” created using artificial intelligence.
The controversy surrounding The Velvet Sundown spun out almost as quickly as it gained traction. A person falsely claiming to be part of the band spoke to media outlets, including Rolling Stone, about the AI usage — and then admitted to lying about the whole thing in an attempt to troll journalists. Later, the official Velvet Sundown page updated its Spotify biography to acknowledge that all the music was composed and voiced with AI...
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies digital forensics, says it's important to note that not all AI usage is explicitly bad. There are many instances in which artists can use artificial intelligence to boost or enhance their work — but both in and out of the music industry, transparency is key to AI usage.
“When I go to the grocery store, I can buy all kinds of food. Some of it is healthy for me; some of it is unhealthy. What the government has said is we are going to label food to tell you how healthy and unhealthy it is, how much sugar, how much sodium, how much fat,” Farid says. “It’s not a value judgment. We’re not saying what you can and can’t buy. We’re simply informing you...”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
