Spotify launches optional AI credits feature, currently in Beta

Spotify has started rolling out AI credits, and the feature is currently in Beta. The feature is currently exclusive to mobile listeners and appears specifically within the Now Playing view.

They don’t show up on the profile of an artist, and it won’t mark an entire track as AI-assisted. Instead, it’ll only show up in specific parts of a track that are AI-generated. For now, choosing to disclose the involvement of AI in tracks is completely optional to artists. The feature isn’t available to all music distributors yet, either, and is in early stages.

The reception was mixed to negative, since this isn’t exactly what people wanted. Making it optional with zero consequences to those who don’t disclose it implies that artists can just choose not to disclose.

Last year, Spotify published an article in which they detailed their plans for AI credits. It involves a better spam filtering system, and the company is attempting to develop an industry standard for the disclosure of the usage of AI in songs. It gives artists a way to indicate what role AI played in a song, and Spotify also clarified that they support responsible usage of AI in songs. This AI credits feature is the first step to the plans they discussed in the article.

In the future, Spotify might make it mandatory for artists to disclose AI-generated tracks. A good implementation would be a report system, where if a listener suspects the use of AI, they can send a report to Spotify.

To be clear, the feature doesn’t automatically go through every uploaded song and automatically identify the use of AI. That’s not a good idea, since there’s a chance of the system falsely flagging songs, which can impact the livelihood of smaller artists. Having humans in the loop to verify songs is also practically impossible.

Spotify wants to regulate this because the tech world is seeing more and more problems with these tools. We even saw how they played a part in a data breach at Vercel recently. Given situations like this, it’s no wonder that Spotify wants to eventually regulate the usage of AI.

Disclaimer: The featured image was generated with AI.

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