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If you think you've seen everything AI could mess up, think again. Spotify recently published AI-generated songs under the names of real artists who died years ago.
The songs in question are "Together" by Blaze Foley, who was killed in 1989, and "Happened to You" by Guy Clark, who passed in 2016, 404Media reports. Both songs were uploaded last week with AI-generated album art that looked nothing like the singers.
While Spotify let these songs through without proper verification, one of them was spotted by Lost Art Records, the label that distributes Foley's music and manages his Spotify page. Craig McDonald, the record label owner, became aware of the fraudulent activity after his wife spotted the song on the music-streaming service.
"It's kind of surprising that Spotify doesn't have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify," McDonald tells 404Media. "One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks if they had the will to do so."
McDonald also added that he was unaware Spotify could add songs to Foley's page without his approval and suggested requiring a manager or estate's sign-off to prevent this in the future.
Another intriguing aspect of the fake tracks is that both of them mention Syntax Error as their distributor, but 404Media couldn't find a company by that name.
Spotify removed "Together" and "Happened to You," according to TechRadar, and blamed SoundOn, a TikTok-owned music distributor that lets users upload music to TikTok and other platforms to earn royalties.
"We've flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed for violating our Deceptive Content policy," Spotify tells 404Media.
AI-generated songs are not new to Spotify. Earlier this month, a band with over a million listeners confirmed their music was AI-generated. Last year, the third-most viral song on Spotify's global charts was an AI track from Germany.
With generative tools like Suno and Udio on the rise, we're only going to see more AI songs in the future. While filtering them out may be challenging, stopping them from appearing under a real artist’s name is something platforms could address immediately.