It’s been clear that with the sudden takeover of artificial intelligence in the modern day, some precautions and limits need to be put in place, especially with the music industry. More specifically there needs to be some way to keep it under control without having AI content growing out of control. As AI improves it slowly becomes harder to distinguish authentic content made by real people and fakes generated by a machine with a prompt. However, something happened with a specific platform as of late that got me thinking, namely YouTube.
YouTube recently made a change to its rules and regulations that placed a limit on AI generated content mainly through monetization. According to The Verge, it’s a “‘minor update’ to existing monetization policies, which already require creators to make significant changes to any unoriginal content in their videos” and that it will “help to better identify when content is mass-produced or repetitive.”
While this doesn’t rule out AI content altogether, it does help to filter out repetitiveness and “spam,” in YouTube’s content and when I got to thinking about how rampant AI music has been on music streaming services, I thought, “Shouldn’t there be some restrictions in place with music streaming?” There should be some method in place where AI content could be labeled as such and made easier to filter out for listeners if they choose to do so. Many art and image sites already have a function like this where AI art or images would be labeled as AI and can be filtered out or outright placed in a separate category. Without a doubt a feature such as this would need work as differentiating AI videos, images and art, as well as music are entirely different endeavors and authentic music being mislabeled as AI is a real possibility with such a function, however the idea is not without its merits.
