Comment by saaaaaam
21 hours ago
No, not really. Spotify is trialling a voluntary “AI Credits” thing where people can highlight use of AI when they release 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?
> The problem is that subjective judgements by streaming platforms on where an AI line is drawn in music production is difficult.
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.
There's a whole spectrum from sfw to nsfw but we don't give up and allow porn on every platform because drawing the line is "difficult". We can use common sense and taste, with all their flaws.
I wouldn't say that porn is not allowed on every platform. basically every mainstream "content posting" platform (fb, ig, tw, tiktok, etc) allows softcore porn, and in fact pushes it on users, both on content an on advertising. if the same was true with AI music I wouldn't bother with the platform
Honestly, debating these corner cases feels like a distraction tactic. The reality is that the bulk of that 44% is total AI slop: one-sentence prompts entered into Suno to generate 1,000 tracks and extract money from subscribers who stream in the background.
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.
It’s not a corner case when you have to enforce it.
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.
But it doesn't. We have a problem. We can focus on addressing the problem without pre-adjudicating every hypothetical corner case.
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.
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Of course ~nobody wants low-effort "I pasted a one-line prompt into Suno and got this out" in their feed. If they did they'd be listening on Suno and not Spotify. The problem is there's no objective, let alone automated, way to tell the difference between that and the corner cases. Artistic quality is an inherently subjective metric, not something that can be enforced via rules.
Who is listening to that crap anyway when you got literal decades worth of great music to choose from?
New great music is being released every day. What should I do, arbitrary decide to never consume any music made past today?
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The same people who read AI-generated stories about AI. Which is, roughly, most of us. There are AI-generated blog posts on the front page of HN multiple times a day. Right now, I see "I prompted ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini and watched my Nginx logs", which is AI slop. I'm sure there's more.
Well, even if you are absolutely deliberate against AI slop like me, you might well just fall asleep listening to an ambient album of your top rated human musician, and wake up to AI slop anyway in an hour or two in which your subscription money had been paying those fuckers' instant ramen.
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.
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Lots of people are listening to it. There’s an AI brand named “Eddie Dalton” on Spotify right now with 589k monthly listeners and a couple of million streams on its top track. This is one of many.
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.
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I can assure you it’s not a corner case: this is one of the things that a lot of creators are concerned about. If a major streaming platform decides your music is not acceptable because you used some AI as part of your production process and blocks your song as a result that has pretty big consequences.
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.
If... If you're pulling from something called a feed ... Are you really surprised to get slop in it?
You're thinking of a feed trough, like for pigs. This use of feed comes from news services.