Sony has announced that it has the number of times it has asked for fraudulent AI tracks to be taken down from streaming platforms has doubled in the last six months.
These are so-called deepfake tracks, made by nefarious individuals looking to fool credulous punters into thinking their creations really are Harry Styles, Queen or Britney Spears etc. In the year up to September, Sony had to ask streamers to remove 260,000 of them, compared to 135,000 in the year up to March.
Sony has said that the problem of “generative AI deepfake tracks that imitate our artists’ voices and likenesses without permission” was “happening at scale, harms artists, misleads fans and undermines the ethical use of AI”.
It added that: “We will keep enforcing our artists’ rights and expect platforms to act quickly and to prevent the same content from reappearing. But it’s becoming an uphill struggle.”
And of course, the quarter of a million that have been discovered are probably just a fraction of what gets through the net.
Speaking to Music Week back in May, Dennis Kooker, Sony’s President of Global Digital Business said that getting a grasp of the sheer scale of AI slop was difficult: “No one knows exactly, which is part of the problem. But could somewhere between 5% and 10% of the streams be fraudulent? Yeah, I think that’s possible.
"Unfortunately, the way that the ecosystem works, for those who really want to exploit it, they have a lot of incentive to create a lot of streams.”
Kooker also spoke at the IFPI Global Music Report event in London that month when he pointed out that deepfakes are “demand-driven… It is taking advantage of the fact that an artist is in cycle and is out there promoting their music.
"That is when we see the worst of the deepfakes appear... benefiting from the demand that the artist has created in the market with their fans, and ultimately detracting from what it is the artist is actually trying to accomplish with their fanbase.”
As for a solution, Sony and the rest of the music industry are still trying to locate that silver bullet...
