A lack of regulation in the U.S. surrounding the use of deepfakes has led to a wave of AI artists washing over streaming platforms, but on Tuesday, Spotify announced it was taking a new step to give users some clarity around whether an artist is an actual human being, or a human-like character created by an algorithm.
Starting in mid-September, the company will begin applying an “AI Persona” label to the latter category. “Listeners have been clear in telling us that they don’t like seeing an artist profile that seems human, only to find out that the persona is AI-generated,” the company wrote in its announcement. The new label “signals to listeners that an artist’s identity may be AI-generated and does not represent a real person.”
Spotify added in its announcement that the human creators behind AI personas on the platform will have an opportunity to self-disclose through Spotify for Artists. A similar voluntary labeling system was proposed last month by a group of organizations representing musicians and record labels.
But the company will also run a review process for suspicious-looking profiles that haven’t self-disclosed, beginning “with artists who have met defined audience thresholds, so the labels cover the vast majority of artist profiles that users visit,” Spotify wrote, without specifying exactly what that threshold would be.
‘AI Personas’ won’t be recommended by default
Artists that have been labeled as AI Personas will also no longer appear in Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations, unless a user already follows an AI-generated artist. The labels will appear in artist banners and “About” sections, in Spotify’s search feature, and next to tracks from AI-generated artists in playlists.
Presumably as an incentive not to try to evade the new system, users will be able to click on the label and see if the creator behind the AI persona self-disclosed or had to be discovered by Spotify.
The streaming platform also introduced “AI credits” earlier this year, through which artists can disclose if the technology was used in various parts of a song’s production, such as writing lyrics.
“With AI credits, we have seen that people are eager to take the opportunity to be transparent and share how they used AI as part of their song’s creative process,” Spotify wrote in its announcement on Tuesday. “We’re hoping for a similar level of self disclosure for AI Personas.”
AI’s place in the music industry
AI is a touchy subject among musicians.
Many will tell you it’s a scourge for their industry, a technology built using copyrighted material without compensation for the artists who created it, and a source of soulless musical slop. Others might be open to experimenting with AI without handing their entire creative process over to a machine.
And for the small minority of people making huge profits streaming AI-generated tracks fronted by completely fictitious artists, it’s obviously been an enormous blessing.
The “artist” Enlly Blue, for example, currently has just shy of 168,700 followers on Spotify, and a profile picture that looks like a heavily airbrushed photo of Marilyn Monroe. Blue’s most popular song, “Through My Soul,” debuted at #44 on Billboard’s “Emerging Artists” chart in October.
Blue is an AI-generated persona, though, a project launched by a songwriter named Thong Viet, according to Billboard: a very profitable one at that. “Through My Soul,” has been streamed well over 29 million times (and counting), meaning that track alone has earned more than $145,000.
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