Spotify has removed more than 50 million tracks that appear to have been created by artificial intelligence from its curated music recommendations so far this year, as the streaming giant works to keep AI-generated music from crowding out human artists.“AI-generated slop and spam don’t belong in your recommendations, and we’ve made changes to keep them out and protect the listening experience,” Spotify said in a statement Tuesday.Last year, the company removed 75 million tracks for what it said were serious or repeated violations of its rules, which prohibit replicating an existing creator’s content or creating media artificially with technology.
The flood of AI-generated creative content online poses a major challenge to streaming services like Spotify, which need to identify and weed out instances of impersonation or deception from among tens of millions of tracks.Here, Spotify said it turned to its listeners for help.The company analyzed patterns within songs that users frequently either skipped or ignored on the platform over the past six months.
These tracks consistently overlapped with the artificially generated audio sometimes referred to as slop.By combining feedback from listeners with metadata and third-party AI detection tools, Spotify was able to update its internal recommendation system to limit how often AI generated content was surfaced.The company acknowledged that AI-detection technology has limitations and that identifying suspicious content could become more difficult as generative AI evolves.For Spotify, the presence of AI generated music can also have huge implications for artists who are paid based, in part, on how often their music is played relative to the total number of streams on the platform.“If the denominator has grown because of AI slop, the percentage that each legitimate rights holder or artist will receive is diminished,” said Morgan Hayduck, CEO of Beatdapp, which sells AI and fraud detection software to music lab...