Latest news with #AIgenerated
The Independent
2 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
Music streaming service adds tags to AI-generated songs so listeners will know
Deezer, a Paris-based music streaming service, announced it will begin flagging albums containing AI -generated songs to combat fraudulent royalty earnings. The platform will display an " AI -generated content" warning, notifying listeners that some tracks were created with song generators. Deezer reports that 18% of daily song uploads, approximately 20,000 tracks, are now fully AI -generated, a significant increase from 10% three months prior. The company suspects fraud is the primary motive for these songs, estimating that 70% of AI song listens are by bots or streaming farms, and will cut off royalty payments for manipulated streams. Deezer is using AI to detect these patterns, effectively "fighting AI with AI," amidst ongoing lawsuits by record labels against AI song generators for copyright infringement.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
AI-generated video of a lion in supermarket misleads online
'WILD LION STORMS INTO GROCERY STORE IN SOUTH AFRICA,' reads the caption of an X post published on June 14, 2025. The 70-second clip shows two different scenes of a lion devouring meat straight from the meat section in a supermarket. A man is also seen running out of the store after attempting to approach the animal. The owner of the X account describes himself as a South African based in the United States. Similar posts have also been shared thousands of times on Facebook and liked more than one million times on Instagram. But claims that the video shows a real lion eating meat in a South African store are false. The footage contains visible cues that it is AI-generated. For example, six seconds into the video, the lion's tail briefly fades and disappears before reappearing. At 28 seconds, a shape that looks like an extra foot suddenly materialises out of nowhere by the lion's hind legs. When the lion moves, it then morphs into something that looks more like a piece of meat. At 48 seconds, a visual effect that looks like water drops appears in front of the meat display and changes some of the meat packs into different shapes. This is especially noticeable in the bottom-left corner. Three seconds later, a roll of ham on the floor starts moving before the lion touches it. The video currently circulating is watermarked '@ataquesferoz', which a Google search shows belongs to a TikTok user. The TikTok account posted the video on June 14, 2025, with a caption reading 'Wild Lion Storms Into Grocery Store #animals #wild animals #Lion #Africa' (archived here). However, it also labelled the video as AI-generated. According to TikTok, it requires 'people to disclose realistic AI-generated content (AIGC) so that they can express their creativity while providing context for viewers' and asks users to report if they see 'undisclosed realistic' AI-generated content (archived here). The TikTok account contains hundreds of similar AI-generated videos that show animals performing jaw-dropping feats. Although the video of the lion was fabricated, wild animals do occasionally escape from wildlife reserves or wander onto the streets in South Africa. For example, four lions got loose from Kruger National Park in April 2025, and more recently, an elephant seal wandered inland in May (archived here and here).
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
AI, bot farms and innocent indie victims: how music streaming became a hotbed of fraud and fakery
There is a battle gripping the music business today around the manipulation of streaming services – and innocent indie artists are the collateral damage. Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating in April that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that's 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily, almost double the number in January. The fraudsters often then use bots, AI or humans to endlessly listen to these fake songs and generate revenue, while others are exploiting upload services to get fake songs put on real artists' pages and siphon off royalties that way. Spotify fines the worst offenders and says it puts 'significant engineering resources and research into detecting, mitigating, and removing artificial streaming activity', while Apple Music claims 'less than 1% of all streams are manipulated' on its service. That may sound encouraging, but in a streaming business worth $20.4bn globally (according to the IFPI), it's likely that hundreds of millions of dollars are being skimmed off annually by rogue operators. Part of the problem is that while the barriers of entry for musicians have been dramatically lowered – uploading songs to streaming services is much easier than manufacturing CDs or vinyl – the barriers of entry for fraudsters are lower too. So the industry has declared war, but hair-trigger automated detection systems mean that artists are seeing their music taken offline even when they've done nothing wrong. Darren Owen, chief operating officer of music distribution company Fuga, suggests streaming fraud 'started to blow up across the industry' around 2021. Grappling with it now makes up 50% of his workload. Using AI and machine learning, Fuga gives streaming patterns a 'severity score', separating out 'non-human listening patterns' to spot fraud. 'You're not going to listen to the same song at the same time across multiple devices,' Owen says, noting that countries like India, Vietnam, Thailand and parts of eastern Europe are hotbeds of click-farm activity, using low-paid workers. 'It's become clear that organised criminals are involved in it as well.' It is not just services like in Germany – which was taken offline after a court injunction – and others in Canada and Brazil who are being targeted by record industry trade bodies for offering artificially inflated streams. Universal Music Group (UMG), the biggest record company in the world, has been accused by Drake of conspiring to increase the play count of Kendrick Lamar's diss track Not Like Us, an allegation UMG denies. The Guardian has spoken to multiple artists who found themselves at the sharp end of this war on manipulation, where unexpected spikes in streams get taken as proof of guilt. Darren Hemmings is managing director of music marketing company Motive Unknown and a musician himself. His distributor recently informed him that a track on one EP, having jumped from 'a few plays a day' to more than 1,000, was guilty of manipulation. 'I wouldn't blame them for drawing that conclusion,' he says, but 'it's very judge, jury, executioner'. He did not manipulate the streams, but could not identify the root cause – other than it simply becoming popular with actual listeners. Northern Irish rock band Final Thirteen had some of their music taken off streaming services due to a spike in the tens of thousands. They suspect this came after a play on Radio 1, but their distributor automatically concluded they were manipulated. 'It's really hard for any artist to prove that they didn't [manipulate streams], but it's even harder for Spotify to prove that they did,' says their drummer, Doobes. '[They] take it down and that's it.' Adam J Morgan, who makes music as indie act Naked & Baked, had a track get over 10,000 streams in a week, possibly from use in a TikTok video, but it was zapped by his distributor RouteNote as suspicious. 'I hadn't done anything wrong and they didn't provide any evidence,' he says, believing it was down to an overly anxious RouteNote. 'I spent that weekend trying to work out what was going on, but Spotify said my music hadn't been flagged at all.' RouteNote did not respond to a request for an interview. Takedowns can cause musicians inconvenience, derail marketing and cost them money. Matthew Whiteside, artistic director of experimental classical event The Night With… (and head of the TNW Music label) had three different albums taken down amid claims of artificial streaming. He tracked it back: TNW Music tracks were being added to manipulated playlists. 'It made no sense [why they were added] based on the genre.' His distributor said he could resubmit the album again, at $40 per album, but with no guarantee it would not be removed again. 'Streaming in general is geared against the smaller and the niche,' he says. 'If we get 1,000 streams a month on an album, I'd be very happy.' As such, paying to resubmit an album is beyond their release budget. Deezer claims it was the first streaming service to implement fraud detection systems. 'We look at a lot of indicators that help our algorithm decide if a user is fraudulent or not,' says Thibault Roucou, the company's royalties and reporting director. 'When we ask for a takedown, we look manually at what's happening and we're very confident that it is extreme manipulation.' Unfortunately, systems elsewhere for taking down tracks often presume guilt and the appeals system is so arduous that small acts, already struggling, just give up. Pop singer Levina, who represented Germany at Eurovision in 2017, saw her music taken off streaming services without warning – it was flagged because she unintentionally had the same name as another artist. 'With streaming services, it's almost impossible to [appeal] through them,' she sighs. 'You fill out a form but it leaves you quite powerless.' She is also chair of the artist council within trade body Featured Artists Coalition, and they are finalising 'minimum standards for what distributors should be doing'. She proposes a traffic light warning system that allows acts time to present their defence or take action to address the problems. Streaming services and distributors now accept this battle is about containment rather than total elimination. Owen, however, says the latest iteration is not fraudsters manipulating the streams of a few tracks by large amounts, but rather boosting multiple tracks a small amount to fly under detection radars. For Hemmings, this could result in a two-tier streaming economy, with smaller acts abandoning the main streaming platforms, where earnings are derisory anyway, to focus on a service such as Bandcamp. 'This could provoke a conclusion among large swathes of the independent music community that they're just better off focusing on other ways to make money.'
Daily Mail
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
The fake AI-generated Holocaust 'victims' duping thousands on Facebook - as Auschwitz museum slams 'dangerous distortions'
At first glance, it is a heartwarming photo: a little girl feeding the ducks on the canal in pre-war Amsterdam. A lengthy description explains that the girl, 'Hannelore Cohen', would 'skip along the cobblestone paths' each morning' - until 'the ducks never saw her again'. What follows is the claim that she was murdered at Sobibor death camp by the Nazis in the Holocaust - but it is not true. The photo has been generated by artificial intelligence, and the story that accompanies it is equally fictitious. The fake post is among dozens of similar ones featuring AI images of supposed Holocaust victims and details of what allegedly happened to them that are being shared to thousands of people on Facebook. Now, the Auschwitz Memorial museum has hit out at the growing phenomenon. A spokesman said: 'While these posts may seem well-intentioned to the audience, they are in fact dangerous distortions. 'They invent stories of people who never existed and present them as real victims. The lengthy post about alleged Holocaust victim Hannelore Cohen 'They exploit Holocaust memory for clicks, shares, and reach. They contribute to confusion and the erosion of historical accuracy.' 'The photos are AI-generated — eerily perfect, stylized, and not drawn from any historical archive. 'Some of the names do not appear in credible Holocaust victim databases and the entire biographies are fabricated.' The post featuring 'Hannelore Cohen' has been shared in a group called Historical Figures, which has more than 110,000 members. It was written by a page named 'Epic Movies'. The page is followed by more than 5,000 people. The post has used the name of a real Holocaust survivor who is listed on the website Refugee Voices as having come to England as part of the Kindertransport scheme for children in 1939. But the invented girl's life story bears no relation to the real Ms Cohen. The post says: 'On 10 September 1931, in the graceful, water-laced city of Amsterdam, a little girl named Hannelore Cohen was born. The accompanying life story says that she was born in the French city of Marseille, that every day she would 'skip to school, her pigtails swaying behind her like banners' and that she loved to read 'Her eyes sparkled with curiosity, and her soul seemed to be stitched from kindness. 'She loved simple pleasures, and few things brought her more joy than walking to the canal near her home, a paper bag of breadcrumbs in hand, ready to feed the ducks. 'Each morning, Hannelore would skip along cobblestone paths, the scent of tulips and fresh bread in the air. She'd stop at the edge of the canal and crumble the bread gently, tossing pieces into the still water. 'Ducks gathered near her like she was their friend. She giggled as they quacked and jostled, and sometimes she named them—"Willem," "Rosa," "Pieter." 'She spoke softly to them as if they understood.' It then adds: 'In 1943, when she was just 12 years old, Hannelore was taken from her home and sent to Sobibor, one of the cruelest death camps. There, her life was stolen. 'Her laughter, her crumbs, her gentle kindness—gone in a moment of merciless inhumanity. 'The ducks never saw her again. The water rippled, but no bread fell. 'And Amsterdam wept in silence. But we do not forget.' Another fake post - this time on a page with more than 14,000 followers called Days Gone By Memories - shows a young, bright-eyed girl named as Nadine Levy. The accompanying life story says that she was born in the French city of Marseille, that every day she would 'skip to school, her pigtails swaying behind her like banners' and that she loved to read. After being rounded up and sent to the notorious Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, the biography says she read stories to lift the spirits of other inmates, and kept a secret diary. On the morning of her death, she is said to have 'whispered a goodbye to the rising sun,' and that after the war her diary was found 'pages worn but full of hope.' In another fake Holocaust post on the Epic Movies page, a girl named as Anja Bakker is seen standing in a field of daisies. According to her biography, before the war she 'ran barefoot in the grass, her laughter mingling with birdsong,' and she loved making daisy chains. The fake post then claims that after being murdered in Sobibor, 'the daisy chains she made' and 'the stories she told, lived on in the memory of survivors.' Established in May 1942, by the time it was closed 17 months later between 170,000 and 250,000 Jews had been murdered in Sobibor. Less than 60 inmates are known to have survived. The Auschwitz Museum spokesman also claimed that Meta, the owner of Facebook, has refused to act to remove the fake posts. They said: 'While some pages simply copy our posts, we can see more and more posts that either add AI-generated photo (sic) or are entirely fabricated. 'Even more troubling, Meta (Facebook) has so far refused to act on this. 'They claim that posts with AI-fabricated images or AI-fabricated information on Holocaust victims do not violate their platform's rules. 'This failure to act sets a dangerous precedent. 'Memory must be protected — not invented.' The accounts featuring the fake images and stories have been approached for comment.
The Guardian
03-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
AI, bot farms and innocent indie victims: how music streaming became a hotbed of fraud and fakery
There is a battle gripping the music business today around the manipulation of streaming services – and innocent indie artists are the collateral damage. Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating in April that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that's 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily, almost double the number in January. The fraudsters often then use bots, AI or humans to endlessly listen to these fake songs and generate revenue, while others are exploiting upload services to get fake songs put on real artists' pages and siphon off royalties that way. Spotify fines the worst offenders and says it puts 'significant engineering resources and research into detecting, mitigating, and removing artificial streaming activity', while Apple Music claims 'less than 1% of all streams are manipulated' on its service. That may sound encouraging, but in a streaming business worth $20.4bn globally (according to the IFPI), it's likely that hundreds of millions of dollars are being skimmed off annually by rogue operators. Part of the problem is that while the barriers of entry for musicians have been dramatically lowered – uploading songs to streaming services is much easier than manufacturing CDs or vinyl – the barriers of entry for fraudsters are lower too. So the industry has declared war, but hair-trigger automated detection systems mean that artists are seeing their music taken offline even when they've done nothing wrong. Darren Owen, chief operating officer of music distribution company Fuga, suggests streaming fraud 'started to blow up across the industry' around 2021. Grappling with it now makes up 50% of his workload. Using AI and machine learning, Fuga gives streaming patterns a 'severity score', separating out 'non-human listening patterns' to spot fraud. 'You're not going to listen to the same song at the same time across multiple devices,' Owen says, noting that countries like India, Vietnam, Thailand and parts of eastern Europe are hotbeds of click-farm activity, using low-paid workers. 'It's become clear that organised criminals are involved in it as well.' It is not just services like in Germany – which was taken offline after a court injunction – and others in Canada and Brazil who are being targeted by record industry trade bodies for offering artificially inflated streams. Universal Music Group (UMG), the biggest record company in the world, has been accused by Drake of conspiring to increase the play count of Kendrick Lamar's diss track Not Like Us, an allegation UMG denies. The Guardian has spoken to multiple artists who found themselves at the sharp end of this war on manipulation, where unexpected spikes in streams get taken as proof of guilt. Darren Hemmings is managing director of music marketing company Motive Unknown and a musician himself. His distributor recently informed him that a track on one EP, having jumped from 'a few plays a day' to more than 1,000, was guilty of manipulation. 'I wouldn't blame them for drawing that conclusion,' he says, but 'it's very judge, jury, executioner'. He did not manipulate the streams, but could not identify the root cause – other than it simply becoming popular with actual listeners. Northern Irish rock band Final Thirteen had some of their music taken off streaming services due to a spike in the tens of thousands. They suspect this came after a play on Radio 1, but their distributor automatically concluded they were manipulated. 'It's really hard for any artist to prove that they didn't [manipulate streams], but it's even harder for Spotify to prove that they did,' says their drummer, Doobes. '[They] take it down and that's it.' Adam J Morgan, who makes music as indie act Naked & Baked, had a track get over 10,000 streams in a week, possibly from use in a TikTok video, but it was zapped by his distributor RouteNote as suspicious. 'I hadn't done anything wrong and they didn't provide any evidence,' he says, believing it was down to an overly anxious RouteNote. 'I spent that weekend trying to work out what was going on, but Spotify said my music hadn't been flagged at all.' RouteNote did not respond to a request for an interview. Takedowns can cause musicians inconvenience, derail marketing and cost them money. Matthew Whiteside, artistic director of experimental classical event The Night With… (and head of the TNW Music label) had three different albums taken down amid claims of artificial streaming. He tracked it back: TNW Music tracks were being added to manipulated playlists. 'It made no sense [why they were added] based on the genre.' His distributor said he could resubmit the album again, at $40 per album, but with no guarantee it would not be removed again. 'Streaming in general is geared against the smaller and the niche,' he says. 'If we get 1,000 streams a month on an album, I'd be very happy.' As such, paying to resubmit an album is beyond their release budget. Deezer claims it was the first streaming service to implement fraud detection systems. 'We look at a lot of indicators that help our algorithm decide if a user is fraudulent or not,' says Thibault Roucou, the company's royalties and reporting director. 'When we ask for a takedown, we look manually at what's happening and we're very confident that it is extreme manipulation.' Unfortunately, systems elsewhere for taking down tracks often presume guilt and the appeals system is so arduous that small acts, already struggling, just give up. Pop singer Levina, who represented Germany at Eurovision in 2017, saw her music taken off streaming services without warning – it was flagged because she unintentionally had the same name as another artist. 'With streaming services, it's almost impossible to [appeal] through them,' she sighs. 'You fill out a form but it leaves you quite powerless.' She is also chair of the artist council within trade body Featured Artists Coalition, and they are finalising 'minimum standards for what distributors should be doing'. She proposes a traffic light warning system that allows acts time to present their defence or take action to address the problems. Streaming services and distributors now accept this battle is about containment rather than total elimination. Owen, however, says the latest iteration is not fraudsters manipulating the streams of a few tracks by large amounts, but rather boosting multiple tracks a small amount to fly under detection radars. For Hemmings, this could result in a two-tier streaming economy, with smaller acts abandoning the main streaming platforms, where earnings are derisory anyway, to focus on a service such as Bandcamp. 'This could provoke a conclusion among large swathes of the independent music community that they're just better off focusing on other ways to make money.'
