Soul “musician” Sienna Rose has made headlines this week as suspicions mount that her music is a product of artificial intelligence.
On Spotify, her sound is described as a blend of the “elegance of classic soul with vulnerability of modern R&B”, while she is simply referred to as “an anonymous neo-soul singer”. Many fans have taken note of the reference to her anonymity, which makes her 2.6million monthly listeners all the more staggering.
She’s also managed to get three tracks – ‘Into the Blue,’ ‘Safe With You,’ and ‘Where Your Warmth Begins’ – on Spotify’s Viral 50 – USA playlist this month.
As noted by Rolling Stone, the debate around her legitimacy as an artist has been ongoing for about a year, but was recently reignited after Selena Gomez posted a carousel of the Golden Globes to Instagram, soundtracked by Rose’s ‘Where Your Warmth Begins’, which has since been removed from the post.
In a statement given to the BBC, streaming platform Deezer confirmed suspicions, saying that “many of Sienna Rose’s albums and songs are detected and flagged as AI on Deezer.”
Despite audiences reportedly struggling to distinguish between “real” and AI music – with a recent report from streaming service Deezer finding that 97 per cent of people “can’t tell the difference” between the two – fans instinctively suspected as much.
This is due to a variety of tell-tale clues, namely that Rose has no social media presence, has never played a show (and as such has no videos up of her performing), and has been releasing songs at an implausible speed.
Last year, in the months between September and December, Rose uploaded at least 45 tracks to streaming services, a creative output even the likes of Frank Zappa or Prince would struggle to match.
It’s far from the first time an AI-generated artist has managed to climb up the charts, which has been a consistent fixture of headlines of late as the music industry struggles to contain the AI boom.
Last week, Bandcamp officially banned AI music from its platform. “If you encounter music or audio that appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI, please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team,” they said. “We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI generated.”
The AI-generated band The Velvet Sundown made headlines last year after gaining around 400,000 monthly Spotify listeners, with a “spokesperson” for the act later admitting that he was running a hoax aimed at “the media”.
The AI-generated artist Xania Monet also made headlines last year after signing a multimillion-dollar record deal and becoming the first AI artist to chart on the US Billboard rankings. The poet and designer behind the project said she saw Monet as “a real person” who is “challenging the norm”.
Kehlani has hit out at the success of Monet, telling fans that the proliferation of AI in music was “so beyond out of our control.” She went on to highlight the power of AI to create fully formed songs without users having to “credit anyone” involved in making the copyrighted works on which such generative music systems are trained.
“Nothing and no one on Earth will ever be able to justify AI to me,” she added.
In September, Cardiff rock group Holding Absence hit out at an AI ‘band’ which had overtaken their streaming figures on Spotify. Frontman Lucas Woodland wrote: “So, an AI ‘band’ who cite us as an influence (ie, it’s modelled off our music) have just overtaken us on Spotify, in only TWO months.”
The vocalist continued: “It’s shocking, it’s disheartening, it’s insulting – most importantly – it’s a wake up call.”