Do any of the major streaming platforms have a stance against AI generated music?
https://support.spotify.com/lc/artists/article/ai-credits/
The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult.
If you human-write a song but use AI to produce a synth stem or bass stem and then mix it down and use AI mastering is that better or worse than if you use AI to help you write something but record with human musicians and a bit of AI assist?
And what if you use AI entirely to write and compose but use human performers to record?
And what if the AI is trained only on licensed content?
It's the same thing with writing. No one cares that you asked a chatbot to help you reword a paragraph in your essay. The problem is zero-effort slop delivered by the truckload to your social media feed.
Someone will end up in the middle and then you’ll be responsible for accepting or rejecting it.
The bulk is obvious but the debate isn’t for the obvious.
If your "work" is mostly AI, and if you don't disclose it, it goes to /dev/null. And yeah, you can get into a debate that it's unfair to reject 51% but allow 49%, but that's how the real world works - otherwise, nothing would ever get done. You also get a DUI for BAC of 0.08% but not 0.07%. That's not an argument for putting DUI laws on hold until we can figure out a more perfect approach.
But this can be easily fixed by turning the autoplay, the slop's best friend, off.
Me personally, I sniff AI on Spotify by empty "about" sections. Which is sad as I always held dear that it's the music that must speak for the author, not the vice versa.
Lots of people don’t care about whether the music they listen to is human created or not - just as lots of people don’t care about lots of other AI slop so long as they are entertained by it.
The biggest issue for new musicians is not AI generated slop, it’s a predatory industry and a backlog of 80+ years of excellent music.
It’s easy (at least for now) to compete with slop - it’s way harder to compete with e.g. Queen, Eminem and the Beatles.
It’s like saying cancer is a problem when you’re bleeding from a gunshot wound to your chest.
Big name heritage artists aren’t the problem - they are the thing that underpins a lot of consumption and keeps people coming back to platform.
Spotify, for example, already said that any track that gets under 1000 streams will not get any money. What if it says “any track that uses more than a proportion of AI will not make any money” - but refuses to say how it makes those decisions so that people can’t game the system.
This may be more of an economic problem. There is a stark difference between a music track with 1% human work/effort, and 0%. You can make many musical tracks if you have to do only 1% of the work, but you can't make >100x what you made without AI (Amdahl's law). While the latter can scale infinitely; you could upload a billion tracks if you wished, you're limited basically by bandwidth and automation. So a classifier or policy which permitted the 99% AI but banned the 100% AI may be adequate.