Manuel Moussallam<\/strong> attributes that jump to two key reasons: the further adoption of AI music tools like Suno and Udio; and, simply, the fact that \u201cour data got better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\u201cPart of the stuff we were catching as AI-generated in January, we weren\u2019t totally sure about, so we were very conservative in the numbers we reported. We didn\u2019t want any false positives,\u201d Moussallam explains. \u201cI think the 18% [figure] is actually much more accurate and closer to what we actually saw from January, but still, that number is increasing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile most of its competitors have not yet taken a public stance on AI-generated music or created any rules specifically to tackle issues it may present, Deezer believes there\u2019s no way to ignore what is happening. In a new interview with Billboard, chief innovation officer Aurelien Herault<\/strong>, along with Moussallam, explains that the clock is ticking: \u201cAt some point, the industry will need to make a decision on this because AI music will exist forever now. There\u2019s no going back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\tYou\u2019ve both said before that your team had a lot of conversations with the music business about the rules you were developing at Deezer before you launched them. Have you had those same conversations with AI companies, like Suno or Udio?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tHerault: Not officially. We are in touch with some of the researchers who work there because we go to the same conferences, but no, we didn\u2019t make contact. Actually, I don\u2019t think they care a lot about us being able to detect their outputs because the issue is on our side, because people are using these tools massively to spam our catalog.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAre you starting to see patterns of how people are using AI content for spam? For example, are most people creating multiple accounts and hopping between them to spread out their mass uploads? Are they artificially running up the streams?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tHerault: What I can say is that they are creative.<\/p>\n
\n\tMoussallam: Well, not creative on the music side, but on the spam side? Very creative.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tHerault: The reason why we got worried about AI-generated music in the first place is that it\u2019s really close to the fraud behavior we were already seeing. You create a lot of accounts. You deliver a massive amount of albums every day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tMoussallam: I think maybe the only new phenomenon we see from AI music is it can also be used for impersonation. You take one artist that streams a lot and then try to create stuff that resembles the style of that artist. That\u2019s quite worrying on our side.<\/p>\n
\n\tHerault: They even try to deliver these songs on official artist pages. That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to combine our AI efforts with our fraud detection system to avoid this kind of behavior.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tTake me back to when you first discovered how much AI-generated content was being uploaded to Deezer and why you decided to devote so much time and so many resources within the company to work on this issue<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\tMoussallam: I think it dates back to maybe 2022 when the first large open-source generative models were released within the scientific community. It was before you had commercial models available, and we had a chance to play with it ourselves. Over time, we started to see momentum with these models. Soon they could generate full songs, which was not possible a few years before.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tObviously, when Suno launched, it was a huge moment. The first thing we did was to go on the platform and download a few songs that people were sharing over there, and then, using fingerprints, we were able to check whether people were also distributing these AI songs into our catalog. We soon found out that, yeah, they were. Back then, we had no idea of the amount, but we knew it was happening. It was really important for us to quantify this phenomenon, and this is what led us to actually researching it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIt took us a few months, and we finally found a system to identify the scale. Eventually, we felt confident enough to share the number in January. We had to double-check a lot, and to make sure we didn\u2019t have too many false positives. We knew that would be a huge problem. We only communicated to the general public once we were confident.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tHerault: Today, we are talking about AI detection, but we\u2019ve seen the same spam and artificial streaming behavior with other kinds of content on Deezer, like public domain songs, noise and rain sounds. So we\u2019ve been developing tools to understand what is on our platform before AI came along. It\u2019s been 12 years now of research and development, so that\u2019s why we can react pretty quickly when new developments occur.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tI often hear mixed reviews about the products that are on the market right now that claim they can detect AI-generated music \u2014 and, even more controversially, can attribute AI-generated music back to the songs that inspired it from the training data. I imagine you\u2019ve had folks doubt how good your tools are. How do you assure them of their accuracy?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tHerault: We made a lot of presentations to the music industry, showing our results. And we also published a paper in the scientific community, so it\u2019s accessible to everyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tMoussallam: In the first paper we published, we stated that this problem cannot totally be solved by our tool. If anything, we are the most in doubt about our own technology because we did the work \u2014 we know exactly how limited it is. This is still an open problem, and it is still easy to bypass our detector.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tHerault: That\u2019s why we share data. We want to open the discussion. We explained to the industry that we cannot solve everything, but we can solve part of the problem with these tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tHow feasible is AI music attribution right now?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tMoussallam: It\u2019s impossible to know if we\u2019re going to be able to do it. It\u2019s a really fast-moving and exciting field, so we want to dive into that. But this is going to take years, probably. The only thing I\u2019m sure of is that there is nothing on the shelf right now that\u2019s able to do this in a satisfactory manner.<\/p>\n
\n\tOne debate I hear in the music tech world is whether or not this flood of AI-generated music is going to be a serious burden for streaming services, in terms of servers and storage space. Someone at a rival music streamer told me they don\u2019t think this is a real concern. Others believe it is. What is your take?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tHerault: This is a serious topic for us, and we already removed some content that was using too much space \u2014 because it\u2019s not only an economic issue, it\u2019s also an ecological one. Do we need to store all this content so we all have the same catalog and all have a copy of the same things? It\u2019s really a question worth thinking about, and we already have had some discussion to remove some content, especially because a lot of content is not listened to at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThat sounds like an issue that streaming services are going to have to face, then.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tHerault: Not only music streaming, I mean, there\u2019s all kinds of AI-generated content \u2014 images, audio, video. It\u2019s everything.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tMoussallam: Audio is actually not such a big file to store when you compare it to movies or some images.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tI always wonder whether younger generations will care whether or not their music came from an AI model or a person. It\u2019s hard for us to wrap our heads around, but if these kids are raised on AI content, maybe their listening habits are different from ours. Have you taken this into account when deciding how you want to treat AI music on Deezer?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\tMoussallam: It\u2019s an amazing research question, but it\u2019s one which doesn\u2019t have an answer yet. I think a lot of people are wondering if we are seeing a shift in terms of the relationship that people have to music. It also raises the question of, why do people love music in the first place? Do you need to have a human relationship, either directly or indirectly, to music to attach meaning to it? I believe a lot of people need that. But I am not sure what people are going to do in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Friday (June 20), French streaming service Deezer launched its latest tool to combat what it calls the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":11535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,12386,820,6584,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-11534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-deezer","11":"tag-fraud","12":"tag-streaming","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114740008479649600","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}