Popular musician Murphy Campbell is targeted by fake AI and copyright trolls

In January, popular artist Murphy Campbell discovered several songs on her Spotify profile Don’t belong there. They were songs she recorded, but never uploaded to Spotify, and something was wrong with the vocals.

She quickly speculated that someone had pulled demos of the songs she had posted on YouTube, created AI-powered covers, and uploaded them to streaming platforms under her name. I played one of the songs, “Four Marys”, through two different AI detectors, and that seemed to support her suspicions as they both said it was probably produced by the AI.

Campbell was shocked, saying, “I was under the impression that we had more checks before anyone could do that. But, you know, we learned a lesson there.” Edge. It took a while before Campbell was able to remove the fake songs, and she said, “They became a pest.” Even then, the victory was not complete. Although the offending tracks aren’t available on YouTube Music or Apple Music anymore, at least one can still be found on Spotify, directly under a different artist’s profile, but with the same name. There are now many Murphy Campbells – “Obviously I was thrilled by it,” the real Murphy Campbell said.

Spotify is testing a new system that will allow artists to do this Approval manually Songs before they appeared on their profile, but Campbell is skeptical after burning them. “I feel, every time, that an entity of this size makes such a promise to musicians. It seems like it’s not what they envisioned, but I’ll be curious to try it in the future,” she said.

This was just the beginning of Campbell’s nightmare.

On the day that A Rolling Stone An article discussing Campbell’s brush was published with AI imitatorsa series of videos were uploaded to YouTube through the distributor Vidya. These videos have not been posted publicly, and it is not clear whether anyone other than the uploader, who goes by the name Murphy Rider, has viewed them. YouTube declined to comment on this story.

Those were used to Claim ownership For material found in many of Murphy Campbell’s videos. Campbell received a notice from YouTube that said: “You are now sharing revenue with the copyright owners of the music discovered in your video, Darling Corey.” The most confusing part is that the songs these claims are about are all in the public domain, including the classic “In pine“, which dates back to at least the 1870s and has been covered by everyone Lead belly to Nirvana (such as “Where did you sleep last night”).

Vydia has since made the claims, and its spokesperson Roy LaManna says the person who uploaded the videos has been banned from its platform. Out of over 6,000,000 claims made by Vydia via YouTube Content ID In the system, 0.02 percent was found to be invalid, which Lamanna says is “by industry standards astonishing.” “We pride ourselves on doing it the right way,” he continued.

LaManna also says that Vydia has no connection to Timeless IR or the AI ​​wrappers uploaded to streaming platforms under Campbell’s name. While the timing is certainly suspicious, Lamanna says the two incidents are separate.

Vidya received so much negative feedback, including, Lamanna says, “literal death threats” that led to offices being evacuated. Campbell wasn’t about to let Vidya off the hook, but he noticed that he wasn’t alone to blame. The worlds of generative AI, music distribution, and copyright are complex with multiple points of failure and opportunities for abuse. “I think it goes much deeper than we think,” Campbell says.