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TITAA #46.5: AI "Fakes," Sproings, and Splats

Music Fandom AI Woe - Camera Moves - Splat - Audio & Narrative Links

Lynn Cherny

Sep 15

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*AI collage art by GanWeaving (twitter, bsky, mastodon, IG) (cropped by me)*

The possibly-AI-possibly-real Harry Styles song leaks story is crazed and actually funny. Before that: I started to write about an archaeology oracle thing I saw on my holidays, and then realized I had more boggling to do about this Styles fandom thing and moved it up. Sorry, archaeology fans. Also, a reminder: while my mid-month news links below the article are for patrons only, you might want to sign up, since I have a bunch of good AI tool news, narrative and data science & NLP repos down below!

The gist of the Harry Styles thing in 404 Media is that a bunch of sample snippets of purportedly new leaked tracks from Harry Styles and One Direction have been teased on social media to encourage fans to pay hundreds to get the full songs. But it’s unclear if they are real or AI fakes. Fans are checking to see if they have been subject to copyright takedowns, because the famously litigious music industry would be all over that, if they were real. And more:

To complicate matters even more, the same people who are selling leaks they insist are genuine are also posting tracks they disclose are AI-generated in an attempt to prove their leaks are real. Their argument is that the AI tracks sound bad in contrast to the “real” leaks, therefore proving they’re authentic.

This is an actual sentence in the 404 Media article: “At best, the sellers in these Discords are selling unreleased tracks that have been stolen from the artists.” “Worst” is that they are selling fakes that people can’t tell are fakes. Two fans who suggested they might be fakes were threatened and called names. At last report, the sales middleman left in a huff after being accused of selling AI-ware when, gosh, they were just trying to help the fans for a small fee. “I’ll just take my shady stolen goods and play elsewhere, you ungrateful jerks.” (That’s me, not the article, he said worse.) The middleman guaranteed to the press they are real songs acquired “from multiple hackers, they are obtained because of email scams, phishing attacking the producers or artists etc.” Oh, good.

404 Media goes into some detail re AI detection consultants they hired and shows actual spectrograms and discusses minute audio details. In conclusion, some might be fake and some might be real.

We are in a strange moment, aren’t we. If it’s “fake” but good, it’s not valuable to the fans? The provenance may be more important than the content on its own, which is certainly also true at auction houses (see my piece #40 here, “Post-Creative Creativity”). Admittedly from a snippet it must be hard to tell the overall quality. Is it also possible that these fans just don’t want to be embarrassed? Like, it would be sad to spend a lot of money, and like a thing, and find out you were in some way fooled. That you couldn’t tell the difference. That you were that desperate for new content. That’s a bad position for an insecure art lover to be in, especially in a community.

Aside: For some other links on music and AI, here’s the fear felt by the music industry over the hit AI Drake song, and the fact that none of the Grimes-sanctioned AI-Grimes songs have truly struck gold although some are, it seems, collecting royalties.

Below the fold, for patrons: an update on the video gen tools (with more comparisons), the latest splatting tools, open audiobooks and new TTS, a cool audio discourse tool, recent narrative links, relief maps, some RAG repos, a few non-Unity game engines, a panel on procgen, a tool for unstructured data. And others!...

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