As the music industry continues to grapple with how to identify and label AI-generated music, Spotify has announced a plan to badge “AI personas”, which means artists that don’t really exist but which have a profile on the streaming service full of AI-generated music.
In a blog post, Spotify writes that “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”. So, from next month, “you'll begin to see an AI persona badge on some artist profiles”. The badge will also appear in search and on track rows across playlists.
Spotify reckons that labelling AI personas is more straightforward than labelling AI-generated tracks, where you have the tricky distinction to make between “AI-generated” and “AI-assisted”.
“Although there’s a broad spectrum in how artists use AI as a creative tool”, Spotify’s blog continues, “the question of whether a profile represents an actual human is one where Spotify can help make a clear determination”. The AI persona badge, it’s keen to stress, is “about the artist’s public identity, not about how the music was made”.
Spotify hopes that people delivering music to the platform under an AI persona will self-declare this fact. Though given it has also announced that music from AI personas will not be included in any editorial or algorithmic playlists or recommendations on Spotify, companies and people currently relying on AI personas may not be so keen on being transparent.
However, Spotify says it will also be monitoring its platform for undeclared AI personas. And when it finds them, not only will it add the AI persona badge to that artist, it will also tell users that this particular AI persona failed to voluntarily declare their AI status.
Presumably some actual artists will end up being incorrectly identified as AI personas, especially if they don’t have much of a social media presence or rely heavily on AI when creating photos and artwork.
But Spotify says there’ll be a system in place for those incorrectly identified as AI personas to appeal. Which is good. But also more admin for artists, because artists and their teams love having more admin to deal with.
Different streaming platforms are currently employing different policies when it comes to how they label and treat AI-generated music, with the only real constant being that AI-generated tracks are removed if they are artificially boosted through stream manipulation, or if there is other bad conduct such as unapproved voice clones or deliberately misleading metadata to suggest the music is by another artist.
Deezer is now removing AI-generated music that doesn’t get any streams in a six month period and Tidal has decided that AI-generated music is not monetisable. Meanwhile the big record companies and their trade bodies are trying to get a voluntary AI labelling scheme off the ground while moving to ensure entirely AI-generated tracks can’t chart.
All of which makes sense to an extent, though the mish mash of rules across the industry is starting to get very confusing.