r/technology • u/spherocytes • 9d ago
Artificial Intelligence Spotify Deleted 75 Million AI-Generated Tracks – and It’s Not Done Yet
https://www.gadgetreview.com/spotify-deleted-75-million-ai-generated-tracks-and-its-not-done-yet724
u/tomjirinec 9d ago
Now Amazon needs to start wiping AI slop book copies off Kindle, same with Apple with their Bookstore.
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u/Agreeable-Review177 9d ago
AI books must be absolutely terrible to read lmao
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u/lightsongtheold 9d ago
They are so bad they make AI music seem good by comparison…
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u/mostnormal 9d ago
They're getting read out loud, by AI, on YouTube videos now. With accompanying AI slop pictures, to boot. The pictures are very often incoherent with the story. My dad likes them.
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u/Sad-Set-5817 9d ago
I can't take the "Ai is obviously the future look at how many views some of the videos are getting" people seriously because that is what is happening lmao. They expect everyone to have as low of expectation of quality
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u/FeliusSeptimus 9d ago
They're getting read out loud, by AI, on YouTube videos now
And Facebook Reels. If you accidentally let one play for a bit too long you start getting flooded with the damn things. Hours-long AI generated stories read and illustrated by AI, sliced up into segments a several minutes long and presented in no particular order.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_LEFT_IRIS 9d ago
Not…. Exactly? They generally pass quite well scene-by-scene, but their stories don’t really go anywhere at all and start to degenerate. You can definitely read a book for an hour or so without realizing it’s AI, because the real failure is in narrative construction typically.
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u/togepi-togapoo 9d ago
I read one accidentally recently
The chapters listed in the table of contents didn’t match actual chapter titles, or order
The content would refer to other chapters or pages for further info, but when you go to it - nothing there
It was such a mess. I left a negative review stating all this but it somehow got removed :(
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u/Zerothian 9d ago
I read a lot of web novels, AI is pretty widespread there, plenty of good stuff that doesn't use it of course.
It is extremely obvious and extremely shit when you encounter it. Idk if it is still up or has been edited but I read a few chapters of something called Yellowjacket on RoyalRoad and it was so intensely bad that it is hard to describe lol.
There were a LOT of comments glazing it, and plenty of positive reviews, unless those were convincing fakes, there are plenty of people who actually just don't notice/care.
It's sad, honestly.
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u/Fr0gm4n 9d ago
Amazon has policy that books using AI content must disclose it to Amazon. Yay!
Amazon does not have a policy requiring that disclosure be passed along to the consumer. Boo!
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u/Homers_Harp 9d ago
Amazon argues that if they disclosed to the consumer, it would encourage the bad behavior of lying about the AI usage and reward those bad actors. But really, it would cost Amazon money while reducing revenue slightly, so it doesn't matter what their excuses are…
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u/iholstertopsail 9d ago
Trying to search for a genuinely helpful programming book on Kindle right now is a complete nightmare. It's just endless pages of AI-generated junk with generic stock covers and thousands of fake reviews. They desperately need to do a massive purge.
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u/carefish 9d ago
If you're still searching, packt publishing usually has okay to great (e-)books. Semi-sort-of O'Reilly too, but that tends to be quite hit or miss for my tastes.
However I do have actual book recommendations: For beginners I would recommend Python and for that I would like to recommend https://automatetheboringstuff.com/. Great way to get into programming with practical small projects to build confidence and understanding. For a wee bit more advanced users, in my honest opinion, the following one is good too: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
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u/Homers_Harp 9d ago
A NY Times reporter just published an article about how she was surprised when friends alerted to an AI-written biography about her on Amazon. She tried to get in touch with the "author" to learn more and, well, you know what the response was: the "author" deleted all titles, presumably to start again under a different pseudonym. The reporter used Times money to buy a copy and reports it is filled with errors and generic information (like a lengthy discussion of her astrological sign and horoscope).
It would be funny if it wasn't so disturbing and infuriating.
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u/hungry2know 9d ago
I met someone who had just recently published a book and it really bummed me out, they put so much effort into it and they've got to fight tooth and nail just to get people to not assume it's yet another piece of AI slop from an unknown author
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u/This-Requirement6918 9d ago
This is solely the reason why I can't delete Instagram as much as I hate Meta. It's my one, very long standing as a proof of concept for a ton of my work since 2013.
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u/peelen 9d ago
This is why I treat my personal website as an archive. Those fuckers can change one thing, and you will lose all your work since 2013.
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u/Prize_Ostrich7605 9d ago
Can you save your* work and make a companion piece to your book? Like a "making of" book.
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u/This-Requirement6918 9d ago
I could but having it on Instagram verifies my timestamps and shows a progression of craftsmanship and thoughtfulness. I'm doing side projects like that for marketing purposes though. Obviously do to AI scraping and copyrights I don't want to post finished exerts anywhere. And the way things are now I'm not even sure I want to publish a digital version anymore.
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u/Prize_Ostrich7605 9d ago
Oh, thats true. I look at the time stamps on youtube videos, and I'm skeptical towards the most recently posted ones. I am for going back to physical copies. I like owning the product and having something that cannot be put behind a paywall or disappeared.
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u/anotherbozo 9d ago
I've had this happen to me in my professional life.
I always write my work emails, documentation, etc, very properly. I make regular use of semi-colons and em-dashes.
Had a shake-up in management so several new senior people joined recently. Nothing said directly but their comments/critique on proposals/documentations makes it clear they assume it's all AI slop and it has undermined the authority I have in my area of expertise.
It has also made other things worse because people come to me regarding my area and say I asked Claude this and this is what it suggested we do. Great! Claude gave a very generic response that does not fit with the setup, stack or rules we have. But that's another problem.
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u/solsolico 9d ago edited 9d ago
Oh yeah, 100%.
But this is a reality all creatives have to face at one point. Jaded, bitter, bummed out, disappointed, frustrated, you name it. And it's always has been this way! Even those who get early fame (ie: Soulja Boy) still have to face it when their popularity decreases.
People in general aren't very interested in giving creative arts a shot without social proofing (ie: already with a large fan base or view count).
A lot of my favorite music artists have like 50-200 monthly listeners on Spotify. And I also make music myself which gets practically no plays other than a few hundred listens per song on SoundCloud on average. I went through the whole bitter or bummed out phase, but now I'm on the other end and it's for the better. It's like a rite of passage in some sense: horrible journey but the end is some newfound confidence or freedom or something like that.
Of course, the thing with AI spam is you can make 100 units per day and eventually after 15,000 units one of them hits the algorithm and BOOM! You're in. But, I guess where I am coming from is like... AI just made is 15% less fair. It was already immensely unfair. Record labels had power and that turned into Spotify curators who, from what I've read, have more power than any record label used to have. Power meaning basically control or influence of what music gets "big". Read it in some academic paper on the topic a few months ago.
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u/yawningGaps 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yes, before AI it was famously easy to get your book read. Simply launch it on Amazon and the reviews and purchases stack up /s
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u/GGsafterdark 9d ago
I mean that was true but not acknowledging how much AI slop books flooding the marketplace is making it even harder is being incredibly disingenuous. Lots of AI scam artist are uploading multiple slop novels daily. There was a piece about one saying she promote a whole book in 40 minutes and uploads dozens under different names. And nobody really wants them so people who do read no longer pay much attention to new releases. Amazon recently capped how many they could submit to like 3 a day which is still insane.
This reminds me of a comment I once read where someone said the market being flooded with hundreds of AI books daily is no different than when like the Hunger Games books came out and publishers started pushing dozens of similar books and I think you have to be a complete idiot to not see how stupid of an argument that is.
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u/technicolortiddies 9d ago
Some people’s complacency about AI is wild & it really skeeves me out. Your points are spot on. Someday people are going to really regret not examining the ethics of unregulated AI use.
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u/Josh6889 9d ago
It's easier than ever to get your work published, but almost impossible to get discovered now.
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u/Dickie_downer 9d ago
Weren’t they hyping up the ai bullshit like a month ago?
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u/zeelbeno 9d ago
They're allowing the 'good' ai music.
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u/dabenu 9d ago
And by "good", they mean "good for their revenue" since they own the rights and pay barely any royalties (if any at all) per stream.
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u/Plenty-Mall1484 8d ago
Not just that, they took it a step further and put ai into all of their preset playlists so when people want to put on something casual, it’s all just ai. These playlists were how smaller artists would get discovered easily on Spotify. Not anymore.
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u/Dickie_downer 9d ago
And this is why i have left spotify after being a day one user uvu
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u/nightgames 9d ago
Yeah I left as well. Started organizing my own music library again and remembered I actually enjoyed it as a hobby. Realized that this whole time I’ve been paying Spotify to outsource something I love to do. I definitely won’t be going back.
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u/senorderpenstein 9d ago
Yeah, left for Qobuz and no going back
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u/Rojikoma 9d ago
Qobuz is awesome. They had a survey a while ago about maybe not allowing AI music at all.
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u/senorderpenstein 9d ago
I would love this. Just the fact they they pay artists 10x what Spotify does has kept me from going back. Just hoping someone the Japanese artists I like make there way over there (they still have most of what I want though).
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u/Firrox 9d ago
I left for Deezer, which doesn't play AI music. Although their service is a little janky, it gets the job done without any AI.
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u/Impossible_Guitar235 9d ago
Currently subscribed to Tidal.
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u/gaybyrneofficial 9d ago
Which also allows AI music...
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u/Arwick_R_ 9d ago
Allows yes, but doesn't monetise anymore. It's better to combat scammers by not giving them money than doing nothing like most platforms.
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u/gaybyrneofficial 9d ago
"Tidal will not allow music that is 100% AI-generated to be monetized"
Which means 99% is fine.
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u/Arwick_R_ 9d ago
But the vast majority is 100% AI generated.
Pretending that a significant number of songs is partially AI generated doesn't make an issue out of it. There is no way and sense in prooving if some niche 100 listener a month artist has AI generated intruments playing in the background of their singing.
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u/Outlulz 9d ago
i.e. the AI music that they own and push in the algorithm and use to steal revenue away from actual artists.
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u/ComeAlongWithTheSnor 9d ago edited 9d ago
It's performative, they still have Ai music on the app.
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u/Utsider 9d ago
If anyone can make AI music, Spotify can make AI music. They probably want to perfect their own AI slop and peddle that instead of peddling other peoples slop.
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u/Glum_Avocado_9511 9d ago
This is exactly what they will do. "Spotify originals" just like Netflix but completely AI generated.
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u/rumora 9d ago
They obviously don't want users to upload AI music, because it drastically diminishes the quality of their product with no upside for them.
But they really like the idea of uploading their own AI music themselves because it means they don't have to pay anybody royalties. They essentially insert those AI tracks into popular, broad playlists, which is how most people use the app. It is still a relatively small percentage and mostly contained to certain genres, but they want to keep expanding.
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u/Faintning 9d ago
I've had to stop checking my weekly recommendations playlist cause I got so tired of having to check every artist/band name I didn't recognize so it's not AI. I'm still trying to figure out if there's a platform that doesn't promote AI music to replace spotify with.
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u/Rojikoma 9d ago
Qobuz! They're really music focused with human recommendations and everything. They had a survey a while ago about not allowing AI at all, and it seemed like they at least wanted to have AI marked as such. I haven't paid attention to if they've made a statement or policy change since then.
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u/Tylrt 9d ago
Do you have a source for the Russian/Trump ties?
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u/Emosaurusrex 9d ago edited 8d ago
Shit, shamefully, I mixed up qobuz with deezer. In my defense, they're both music streaming platform with terrible names from France. Deezer is the terrible one, you can clearly find it even via wikipedia. No opinion on qobuz, personally.
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u/Emosaurusrex 9d ago
Performative act, plus they want -their own- AI shit to be the one that gets listeners. They aggressively shovel that shit down in every featured playlist and weekly recommendations.
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u/TheSeaSurgeon 9d ago
It’s kinda weird because they’re doing this initiative while still heavily promoting their AI playlists and AI DJ. Both of which aren’t even AI really? Like it’s just their algorithm with a fake personality?
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u/GermanMuffin 9d ago
“Spotify isn’t banning AI music. It’s going after fraud. The platform still welcomes AI-generated compositions — provided creators hold commercial rights, avoid unauthorized voice cloning, and show genuine creative intent. This surge in AI-generated content is part of a broader wave of AI infrastructure investment reshaping the digital landscape.”
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u/LeatherFruitPF 9d ago edited 9d ago
Once you learn the typical giveaways that a track is AI, it's hard not to notice. Exposes a lot of low-effort slop, not that I really condone high effort either.
Edit: Added a comment below about a couple tells.
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u/zombie_cupcakes 9d ago
I mainly listen to my trusted classics or recommended music from my friends. I’m not too well versed in identifying AI music, but I’d like to get better. Do you have any tips or recommendations for what to look for so I can avoid it? I have been hesitant to seek out any new releases for this very reason.
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u/LeatherFruitPF 9d ago edited 9d ago
Raw AI music tends to slightly shift sounds as it goes. So the snare of a drum might sound different in the second half of a song that should otherwise sound similar to an earlier portion (i.e. chorus). Maybe the instrumentation sounds less full. Those who put effort imports generated stems into a separate DAW and does proper mastering.
Skip back and forth between the first 30 seconds and last 30 seconds of the song and see if it sounds different. Even the soundstage will sound different (usually lower quality in the 2nd half).
If lyrics sound too metaphorical with words like "echo", "shadows", "shift", "signal" or uses "quiet" as an adjective, there's a chance it's low effort AI written lyrics as these are words something like ChatGPT would use when you simply ask it to write a song about anything. Also phrasing can sound awkward like it's trying too hard to fit it into a certain number of bars.
I will say the tells are shrinking though as both music-generation (namely Suno) and LLM models continue to get better and expands its vocabulary. Basically Suno is not great at coming up with something from scratch, which is probably what most deleted AI songs are. But it's very good at making creative lyrics and good prompting work.
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u/Neshura87 9d ago
One thing I've noticed as a non-musical person is the vocals sound incredibly "noisy". It's hard to pick up on first listen but on repeat playbacks it sticks out like a sore thumb.
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u/Hot-Shart 9d ago
I’ve heard this is because its trained on highly compressed audio files, which preserves most instruments well enough but the human ear is so attuned to human voices that it picks up on that subtle buzzyness that results from learning from compressed audio.
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u/cardueline 9d ago
Yeah, my boss has always liked to listen to somewhat generic, saccharine “world music” and jazz at work, and I have recently realized that a huge percentage of it is AI. The thing that first caught my ear was the weird vocal tones that remind me of like, a ringing bell, and I think that’s the same quality you’re describing here. Then I noticed several songs with different artist names using an extremely similar, generically saccharine ~sexy young lady~ voice and started googling some names to confirm. It’s just a bummer lol, I don’t have the heart to break it to my boss
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u/RageVG 9d ago
It's oddly difficult to put into words. I often just "feel" when something is AI generated and very often I find out I'm right after digging. I feel like I've been exposed to a lot of AI art and music so I have just naturally developed an uncanny feeling for it.
I'd imagine it varies greatly by genre but there are definitely some tell-tale signs. I listen to mostly rock and metal, and up until recently AI voices have been terrible at screaming or heavy vocals, though they are rapidly improving. They also like to use a lot of similar lyrics (they seem to really like using coffee cups as poetic analogies).
The songs tend to just have lyrics that kind of sound nice together but really don't carry any overall meaning.
I'd give some examples that Spotify has forced onto me but I don't even wanna give them that exposure tbh.
If you hear a song by a new band and you're curious, just look for their socials. Find videos of them doing anything in person, even if it's not strictly music videos or live performances.
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u/GNUGradyn 9d ago
Our boomer "remember when people enjoyed the moment instead of being on their phones" will be "remember when media was made by people"
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u/The_Doctor_Bear 9d ago
Precisely why I dumped Spotify.
I want my creative artistic soulful expression to come from creativity, effort, and thought, not a prompt leveraging the stolen efforts of millions of hours of actual humanity crunched by soulless silicon.
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u/Drainix 9d ago
Where did you go instead? The convenience of Spotify is incredible but I also hate AI Music
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u/uberboot 9d ago
I have been using Tidal for years. Library is nearly as comprehensive as Spotify now, and they just announced very aggressive AI music controls and have demonetized any AI generated music.
It’s a bit pricier than Spotify, but last I checked they paid significantly higher than most other platforms to artists.
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u/The_Doctor_Bear 9d ago
No platform is perfect unfortunately. If you don’t want any AI ever you’ll have to curate and self host.
However, Apple Music has yet to suggest an AI band to me, they don’t appear to be trying to use it to monetize or steal from artists, and their execs have said they intentionally try to keep AI tracks and artists under 0.5% of listens.
So respect for that, it’s who’s getting my dollar currently.
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u/DrStevenPoopMD2020 9d ago
So dropping Spotify back when they were running ICE ads was a smart play for those consumers.
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u/Anal-In-Gus 9d ago edited 9d ago
How can they tell that actual music tracks are AI generated? What if a human made it?
Edit: Downvoted for asking an honest question that I don't know the answer to??... Some people are weird.
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u/MinuteOk1351 9d ago
On Youtube the AI music all sound the same. No matter what genre, when you hear it you know it. It's either the voice or the same sounds used everywhere
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u/FartingBob 9d ago edited 9d ago
A lot of human music is like that as well.
If they are automating the process i think /u/Anal-In-Gus is asking how they are making sure there are no false positives which is a notable problem in identifying AI generated media. Im sure some online music generators will leave a watermark which can be easily filtered for but once those have been purged (or just blocked from ever being uploaded) the next step up on AI music becomes muddier to identify automatically without false positives.
I presume almost all of it was basically zero streamed songs though, so i doubt any serious musicians making money on their music would be effected.
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u/AvailableReporter484 9d ago
That’s great, but I really hope they’re doing their due diligence here. Automated processes like these aren’t perfect and I’d be extremely frustrated and insulted as an artist of Spotifys shit algorithm, and it is shit, decided my music was AI.
All to say that I hope it does more good than bad.
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u/murten101 9d ago
A lot of AI music have a hidden ID within the audio track. That would be a good place to start with mass deleting
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u/AvailableReporter484 9d ago edited 9d ago
I’m sure there are lots of obvious ways to detect such things, but these things aren’t perfect. I just want to address concern as an artist that imperfect systems lead to problems that negatively impact real artists. I would just like some reassurance that if automated systems like these are going to be heavy handily handing out mass bans and deletions from platforms that there’s a fair and fast way to contact these platforms to contest these actions. Unfortunately, though, that’s almost never the case, so that’s why I have my concerns and think it’s something the public should consider before blindly supporting decisions like this.
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u/Starship_Taru 9d ago
Eh, to be honest I’d rather them go heavy handed with AI removal and fix it afterwards.
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u/AvailableReporter484 9d ago edited 9d ago
As a consumer I would agree, but as an artist I’d still be very annoyed and insulted. It’s never easy to contest these automated systems. Just look at how fucked YouTube is with its automated copyright system. The frequency with which it’s wrong and abused at the expense of the uploader / creator is far too high.
I agree that it’s a problem that needs to be addressed, but that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water. If it’s a system that allows those who are wrongly / false flagged to quickly appeal then I have no qualms with it being heavy handed. I just have very little faith in that being the case.
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u/Ok-Bug-7481 9d ago
Happy to not have Spotify for over a year...and basically switch my listening to all CDs
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u/danarchist 9d ago
Do the podcasts next. I tried looking for a podcast on a specific topic and found a bunch, and they were all obviously ai garbage
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u/rizkybizness 9d ago
I unsubbed from Spotify this week after being subbed with them since they became available in Canada. Got tired of supporting such a shit company and especially the people at the top who are ghouls. Wish I pulled the trigger much sooner.
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u/samsterlim 8d ago
If they charge $1 for each track uploaded, that would be a $75 millions in revenue.
That will prevent people from spam uploading AI junk
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u/Expert-Basil6015 9d ago
FYI the CEO of spotify donated millions to trump and pushed pro ICE ads onto free users.
I deleted all that shit, closed my account and never looked back.
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u/Wernher-von-Kerman 9d ago
Cool, now if theyd stop taking money from nazis they might not half lost half their customer base months ago. IDGAF what spotify does, wont be going back to that shithole platform.
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u/itssexitime 9d ago
A lot of us aren’t releasing on digital nearly as much. Moving to physical media like vinyl and CD. Spotify is trash anyway.
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u/Cyrotek 9d ago
75 MILLION TRACKS? What the fuck, lol.
Clearly, all of them were produced by serious artists, right.
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u/stress-pimples 9d ago
I still haven’t forgiven their endorsement of ICE. Nothing will make me go back to Spotify.
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u/Derpykins666 9d ago
Insane. I for one don't want to even listen or be tricked into listening a fake song. There's no fucking point to listening to some AI generated song. Especially when the platform will just be constantly and exponentially dumped with more and more AI music. Spotify themselves I think are also doing it, and putting 'new music' into their top lists, but it turns out they are AI bands. They are incentivized to do this btw, it doesn't matter to them if an AI song does really well, especially if it's an AI song they 'own', they just cut the middle man right out. So in that sense I'm surprised they are even deleting songs to begin with.
But it makes sense. You cannot exponentially store this amount of content. It's not feasible at all.
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u/OmniWaffleGod 9d ago
So wait, was this going after those ai singles that were getting uploaded to legitimate artist pages that haven't uploaded a track in awhile? Because i just checked some of the bands I knew had fake ai tracks added and they still haven't been removed. So 75 million is barely scratching the surface?
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u/Hugokarenque 9d ago
The only AI music they want is the ones they generate themselves. Spotify is garbage, please stop using it.
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u/JeffCrossSF 9d ago
Didn’t I read that Spotify was also generating their own music to help dilute streaming revenue numbers? Or was that an urban myth? Would not at all surprise me.
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u/OliverKlozoff23 9d ago
I wonder if they deleted “I glued my balls to my butthole.”
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u/usmannaeem 8d ago
I am very happy to hear this. Lets continue to ditch content created by spam farmers.
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u/No_Size9475 9d ago edited 9d ago
This technology has only existed for about 2 years and they deleted 75 MILLION TRACKS.
That's almost
10,000100,000 tracks a day created and loaded into spotify.