As the artificial intelligence industry continues its years-long crusade to find a use case for its multi-billion-dollar tech that does not make a normal person go “Ugh, fuckin’ really?” when told about it, Sony has revealed that it’s had to use human time and energy to request that something like 135,000 musical deepfakes, purporting to be sung by its artists, be pulled off of various streaming services. This is per BBC News, reporting on statements made by Sony president of global digital business Dennis Kooker, who claimed that at least 60,000 of these AI-generated songs were added to various services in the last year alone.
This was all in the context of the IFPI releasing its latest Global Music Report this week, confirming that, yep, music streaming services are now not only big business, but the big business in music—representing 52.4 percent of all music revenue, planet-wide. Which might help explain why guys like Kooker are so worked up about the deepfakes—especially because they’re a very specific problem for artists trying to release new music into our ever-more-fractured market. See, the people making song clones have access to the same information the rest of us have in terms of how much interest, say, a new song by Sony artist Beyoncé might generate in the lead-up to a new album—and thus focus their efforts on faking their way to scraping a bit more cash out of the algorithms by copying whoever’s hottest. (Which, among other things, means artists going out and promoting themselves are also serving to feed their own parasites.) The IFPI called on streamers and tech firms to institute technology and policies that detect and label AI-generated music to help combat the problem, with IFPI CEO Victoria Oakley saying, “The challenge of identifying and labelling AI material is absolutely the next critical challenge” facing modern music.
And that’s before we get into the subject of AI listeners, which are as threatening to the business’ health as AI artists—because one of those places tech continues to produce life-giving innovations for modern living is in the field of “finding ways to use computers to fake Spotify streams to milk more money out of the system.” Oakley decried the practice in a separate statement, saying, “Streaming fraud is theft, plain and simple. The organizations with the data, scale and leverage to prevent this fraudulent activity, including streaming services, content aggregators and distributors, must take decisive action.”
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