Despite taking some steps to combat the proliferation of AI-generated audio on its platform, Spotify has failed to catch an impersonator imitating the music of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. The long-running Australian experimental rock band has been an outspoken critic of Spotify and was one of several artists to remove their music from the platform over the summer. The move followed the discovery that outgoing CEO Daniel Ek was a lead investor in an AI-focused weapons and military company. Today, a poster on Reddit recommended what appeared to be an AI-generated copy of one of the band’s songs to Spotify’s Release Radar playlist. The fake artist was called King Lizard Wizard and he had an album of tracks all sharing titles with songs by the original band and using their original lyrics. Futurism took screenshots of the imposter, although it appears to have since been removed; only the group’s original page appears in searches for its name and the name of the AI.
However, fake band King Gizzard’s album went unnoticed by the company for weeks before today’s social post surfaced. The Reddit thread discusses several other anecdotal cases where someone tried to trick listeners with AI-generated versions of popular bands. In September, Spotify unveiled a spam filter to detect AI errors, as well as policies to disclose the use of AI in content it hosts and how it would combat AI impersonations. An example like this, especially one that features an artist who left the platform in protest, creates a pretty big question mark over the effectiveness of these policies.
