As one of the music industry’s ‘big three’ record labels, Sony Music is understandably on edge when it comes to the softening of the rules and regulations around AI training. As part of a recent consultation being carried out by the UK government, Sony shared that it had isolated and moved to take down over 75,000 examples of tracks that purport to feature artists on their roster, but are, in fact, AI-generated.
The duplicated artists include the likes of Beyoncé, Harry Styles and Queen - all big financial pillars of the label. The artists' voices were algorithmically modelled and used to sing/perform original or AI-generated songs, which were then uploaded to steaming platforms.
As Sony told The Financial Times, the quantity of songs generated in this way is only increasing as technology (and access to deepfake technology) gets cheaper and easier.
