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ARIA bars wholly AI-made music from its charts and awards

From Friday ARIA excludes wholly AI-generated music from charts and awards. Members pressed LinkedIn's machine-writing flag more than 1 million times in three weeks, and Paint writes a 16-byte identifier into every AI image it makes.

Artificial Intelligence··Midday
On a bright laboratory bench, a black record and a pigment-rich glass layer meet the same optical beam, revealing sixteen small light points within the color.

ARIA shuts the charts after a Madonna cover

The Australian Recording Industry Association said on Tuesday that wholly AI-generated music is excluded from the charts and from the ARIA Music Awards, while tracks that use AI in a supporting role stay eligible. The rules take effect on Friday. The decision follows a cover of Madonna's 1989 song Like a Prayer by Brisbane DJ Josh Fawaz, who acknowledged last month that its vocals and drums were AI-generated after listeners and producers raised doubts; the track has passed 48.5 million plays on Spotify and tops the ARIA Top 20 Australian Dance Singles Chart. ARIA is leaning on a labelling scheme introduced last month by industry bodies including the Recording Industry Association of America, under which a recording counts as AI-Generated when AI made the entirety or primary portion of its creative elements and AI-Assisted when it supplied only some expressive elements. Chief executive Annabelle Herd said the charts should not recognise music generated wholesale by technology that leans on other artists' work; Fawaz called the change a good move.[1]

LinkedIn's machine-writing button is pressed 1 million times

LinkedIn added a button at the end of July for reporting posts that read as machine-written, and members have pressed it more than 1 million times in three weeks. Chief product officer Hari Srinivasan says posts marked that way are now getting around 40 percent fewer views than before the button existed. Srinivasan says LinkedIn's automated systems were already catching hundreds of thousands of machine-written comments a day and blocking billions of automation attempts, and that the company still has work to do to keep the feed recognisably human. LinkedIn also withdrew its enhance your post writing feature and put a proofreader in its place, on the reasoning that a tool which rewrites a whole post encourages the behaviour the button now reports.[2]

Paint writes a server-issued number into every AI image

Xusheng Li, a developer at Vector 35, found that Microsoft Paint and Photos write a 16-byte globally unique identifier invisibly into the pixels of images generated on the user's own machine. The number is issued by Microsoft's own moderation service, which did not respond to a request for comment. The prompt goes to Microsoft for moderation and the identifier that comes back is encoded into the image. Paint also sends the previous promptGenerationId as lastPromptGenerationId with its next request, so successive prompts can be linked to one another. Li argues that Microsoft disclosed the watermark but did not make clear that its C2PA manifest carries an identifier tied to a user's prompts, and likens the practice to the tracking dots colour laser printers have long added to pages.[3]

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References

  1. News sourceAl JazeeraAustralia's charts shut out wholly AI-made tracks after a Madonna cover↩
  2. News sourceThe RegisterMembers flagged machine-written posts a million times in three weeks↩
  3. News sourceThe RegisterPaint hides a server-issued number in every AI image it makes↩
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