Murphy Campbell found modest renown in the music industry in the good old-fashioned way: by strumming her banjo, all alone, in the backwoods of North Carolina. She has no agent, no manager, no publishing label. Instead, she props up her phone, and records herself perched on a log, or an old rocking chair, singing songs inherited from old relatives, or ones she has written herself. Right now, she’s raising funds to release her new album, not by pitching industry big shots, but by promoting a Kickstarter.
One day in January, earlier this year, Campbell noticed something strange: There were songs popping up on her Spotify profile that she knew nothing about, although they did include snippets she’d posted on YouTube. Right away, she had a theory: Someone had likely fed those snippets into AI, asked it to generate a whole song, then uploaded it under her name. She contacted Spotify, and they helped her remove these songs.
But this past weekend, things escalated.
Campbell discovered that, first of all, AI-generated covers of her work had been uploaded to YouTube by someone—or something—using a distribution company called Vydia. Then—and here’s where things get very strange—Vydia appears to have successfully made multiple copyright claims on YouTube, effectively fooling the platform into thinking the AI-generated version of Campbell’s music was the original. The singer got a notification: “You are now sharing revenues with the copyright owners of the music detected in your video.” In other words, she was ceding the profits of her own work to the bots that copied it. (A spokesperson for Vydia told The Verge that the person who had uploaded the fake videos of Campbell’s songs has been banned from their platform, and that the company had given up all of its copyright claims to her work. He added that Vydia was receiving “literal death threats.”)
“I was under the impression that we had a little bit more checks in place before someone could just do that,” she said in a video posted on Instagram that promptly went viral. She also warned that her story might not be as unusual as it sounds. “It’s the Wild West,” she said, “and it could happen to anyone.”
