In January, folk artist Murphy Campbell found songs on her Spotify profile she never uploaded. Someone had pulled her YouTube performances, cloned her voice with AI, and distributed the results to streaming platforms under her name. Two independent AI detectors flagged the track 'Four Marys' as probably AI-generated.
This is not just a story about a deepfake. It is a story about how the copyright system fails working musicians when bad actors exploit the gap between what technology can do and what the law can address. The method here is deliberate: use a real artist's name and likeness to launcher fraudulent content onto legitimate platforms.
The full piece unpacks how Campbell discovered the fakes, what platforms did or did not do in response, and where the copyright troll angle enters the picture. That last part is what makes this worth reading in full.
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