Music Streaming Service Makes Big Move Against AI

Music streaming service Deezer said Friday that it will start flagging albums with AI-generated songs, part of its fight against streaming fraudsters. Deezer, based in Paris, is grappling with a surge in music on its platform created using artificial intelligence tools it says are being wielded to earn royalties fraudulently. The app will now display an on-screen label warning about "AI-generated content" and notify listeners that some tracks on an album were created with song generators, per the AP.

• Deezer's move underscores the disruption caused by generative AI systems, which are trained on the contents of the internet, including text, images, and audio available online. AI companies are facing a slew of lawsuits challenging their practice of scraping the web for such training data without paying for it.

• According to an AI song detection tool that Deezer rolled out this year, 18% of songs uploaded to its platform each day, or about 20,000 tracks, are now completely AI-generated. Just three months earlier, that number was 10%, Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a recent interview.
• AI has many benefits, but it also "creates a lot of questions" for the music industry, Lanternier says. Using AI to make music is fine as long as there's an artist behind it, but the problem arises when anyone, or even a bot, can use it to make music, he said. Music fraudsters "create tons of songs. They upload, they try to get on playlists or recommendations, and as a result they gather royalties," he said.
• Fraudsters can earn big money through streaming. Lanternier pointed to a criminal case last year in the US, which authorities said was the first ever involving artificially inflated music streaming. Prosecutors charged a man with wire fraud conspiracy, accusing him of generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and using bots to automatically stream them billions of times, earning at least $10 million.
• Fully AI-generated music still accounts for only about 0.5% of total streams on Deezer, but the company said it's "evident" that fraud is "the primary purpose" for these songs, as it suspects that as many as 7 in 10 listens of an AI song are done by streaming "farms" or bots, instead of humans. Deezer is a small player in music streaming, which is dominated by Spotify, Amazon, and Apple, but the company said AI-generated music is an "industry-wide issue."

More here. (More Deezer stories.)