This is how musicians, producers, and others in the industry are describing the relentless spread of AI clones. Of course, AI fakes aren’t new, but as the scammers have gotten more brazen, artists are responding with increasing furor.
We got a taste back in 2023 with multiple AI Drake tracks. But, in the last two years, the problem has gotten worse. Everyone from Beyoncé, to experimental composer William Basinski have had fake songs, likely generated by AI, appear to be streaming next to their names. And this week King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard found itself the latest target. Frontman Stu Mackenzie responded with anger, but also resignation, telling The Music, “we are truly doomed.”
Spotify has taken steps to address the issue, formalizing its policy against impersonation and removing 75 million spam tracks from its service. But the scale of the problem and the way the current system functions have made it difficult to rein in. Deezer says that 50,000 AI-generated tracks are uploaded to its library per day, accounting for more than 34 percent of the music it ingests.
Bad actors take advantage of the fact that music isn’t uploaded directly to Spotify and several other streamers; instead, it goes through a third-party distribution service like DistroKid. It’s unclear what, if any, screening is in place to ensure that someone uploading a song is who they claim to be. (DistroKid did not respond to a request for comment.)
This is how the seemingly AI-generated reggaeton song wound up on the Spotify page of William Basinski, an artist who specializes in ambient pieces built around the sounds of colliding black holes, crumbling tape loops, and shortwave radio broadcasts. “It’s total bullshit,” he told The Verge. “Luckily, my label and distributors keep an eye on these idiocies… What a mess.”
The response from Luke Temple of Here We Go Magic, whose dormant band was reactivated by AI impostors, was similar. Here We Go Magic haven’t released new music since 2015, but after an AI track made its way onto the band’s Spotify page, Temple told NPR that, “it is so awful.” Similarly, when an AI-generated song called “Name This Night” appeared on the Spotify page for the band Toto in July, guitarist Steve Lukather called it “shameless” in a statement to Ultimate Classic Rock.
Now, it’s possible some of these fakes aren’t AI, but AI makes it a hell of a lot quicker and easier to crank them out. While Suno is designed to ignore artist-specific prompts, it’s still easy to generate entire songs with just a few words.
“It’s total bullshit… What a mess.” — Willam Basinski
Breaking Rust is not a clone of a specific artist, but Blanco Brown has accused the creator of modeling it on his vocals. Brown told the AP about someone texting him to let him know that “somebody done typed your name in the AI and made a white version of you. They just used the Blanco, not the Brown.”
Brown’s manager, Ryan McMahan, took to LinkedIn, saying, “AI can run a formula. It cannot recreate Blanco’s life experience that he pulls from. It cannot recreate the humanity, the conviction, or the lifetime of emotions that shaped his artistic voice.”
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