a foray in the spotify twilight zone

12 Jan, 2025

In early December, Spotify served me a rock song with a sick riff and (what I thought was) a clever title, which I am not naming for reasons. I clicked the Like button and moved on.

In early January, I casually looked back on it, wanting to see if the artists had any other songs I might like, and started becoming confused.

The song was listed as a collab between three artists as well as a remix attributed to a specific remix artist, but I couldn't find any original un-remixed version of the song; but whatever, I can imagine that happening sometimes.¹ The thing I couldn't get past was that the main artist's picture in the sidebar seemed to be a bunch of AI-generated portraits. I really hesitate to make claims like this for kind of Blackstone's ratio reasons — obviously AI-generated art is a thing, but there already are real artists whose work gets called AI-generated and getting it wrong in that direction seems much worse than the alternative. Still, that was what it looked like to me.

I looked the artists up and found them on the website of a self-styled "collective" of musicians with very grandiose language. It seemed that the collective wanted nothing less than to revolutionize the music industry. That website then listed half a dozen bands and musicians in the collective, each with pictures and a paragraph-long bio. All the paragraphs were like: this musician's music has this vibe, covers these topics, spans these genres in so-and-so innovative way. Here's their debut single with so-and-so name, which is out now or will be soon. Several nouns were described with the word "haunting".

But... looking at all the individual musicians' photos together, I was pretty sure they were all AI-generated. There were a variety of backgrounds and clothes and I didn't see any anatomical smoking guns, but all the pictures had a consistent uncanny "glow-up" effect in the face.

Also there was a merch store. (But I was fully expecting a cryptocoin or similar at this point, and didn't see one.)

The first "band" in the collective, which had a band logo instead of a "photo", had their own website, which named a single musician/producer. It was worded a little strangely, emphasizing that the musician's work incorporated words like "technology" and "innovation" without literally saying "AI" anywhere. On the other hand, the album's Bandcamp page did say that "AI technology" went into it. But the photo of the musician looked real, and an online search suggested they had put out other music and random things on social media for several years, perhaps more than a decade.

The other artists didn't have their own websites, but they did have somewhat active Facebook accounts/pages. But...

• all the pages used the same probably-AI-generated photos as they did on the group website;
• all the pages listed email addresses under the group website;
• all the pages seemed to only comment on each other's pages, mostly about their music group and occasionally about the Bible;
• none of the pages seemed to have activity older than three months. I couldn't find anything about these musicians older than three months elsewhere either.

There was one musician who the group collaborated with on one song who did not seem to have an AI-generated image and seemed real.

I didn't really know how to feel about all this. I enjoyed the song! The riff holds up, the title is clever. It sounded too clean and well-structured for any major part to be a verbatim output of a music generation AI model, though I don't claim to be an expert at distinguishing this. Some of the lyrics (or, my best guess of the lyrics based on listening, since I couldn't find them online) don't quite hold up to close scrutiny, but that's true for many human-written songs too.

I felt deceived to realize that the listed artists were probably not real people, and the grandiose language was a turn-off too. But I couldn't exactly point to anything "material" I felt misled about. Even if those artists weren't real, there did seem to be a named human musician behind all this, releasing music at a reasonable pace², not, like, a faceless corporation flooding the market for profits. If they, or whoever was responsible for all this, had been upfront about all the "artists" being AI-generated, and depending on how and how much AI was used in the rest of the process, I might appreciate it as weird performance art? And, aren't there some people who would really dig that kind of thing? Why was this project so cagey about the whole thing?

There's a fallacy I realized I might be committing while reading an old post I read somewhere (I want to say, nostalgebraist's tumblr, n years ago): that my opinion or evaluation of some work of art should be in some sense a "pure function" of the work, not influenced by incidental/extradiegetic factors. Maybe something like that should be true for, say, a contest with a prize, barring disqualifying concerns like plagiarism; you don't want to pick one story over another solely because the author has a more sympathetic life story or background. But I'm just forming a private, personal opinion, and I'm allowed to feel that some cheesy love song resonates more in a world where I knew the singer/songwriter actually had a great relationship and they did really nice things for each other, than in a world where I knew they were just asked by management to write such a song for their next album (or where I knew the song was directly output by an AI model), even if it were somehow the exact same audio in either case. Us humans appreciate art in part for how they allow us to relate to each other. Then again, I don't scrutinize most other songs on my Spotify playlists in that depth and don't assume or concern myself with whether most of them are completely authentic to the singer/songwriter's own lives. Many songs are just about a common human experience or emotion in the abstract, and that's totally fine with me, I can often resonate with them through that alone.

I don't have a conclusion.