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    Folk artist Murphy Campbell discovered AI-generated covers of her songs uploaded to Spotify under her name without consent, according to The Verge

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    Someone scraped Campbell’s YouTube performances, created AI voice clones, and uploaded them to streaming platforms – two AI detectors flagged the track “Four Marys” as likely AI-generated

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    The case highlights how independent artists are defenseless against AI fraud, with streaming platforms lacking verification systems to prevent voice cloning abuse

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    This incident reveals critical gaps in copyright protection as AI tools make it trivially easy to clone voices and impersonate artists at scale

Folk musician Murphy Campbell just became the latest victim in AI’s Wild West. In January, she discovered songs on her Spotify profile that she never uploaded – AI-generated covers of her own performances, scraped from YouTube and uploaded under her name without permission. The incident exposes a growing crisis where independent artists face both AI voice cloning fraud and a copyright system too broken to protect them, raising urgent questions about platform accountability in the age of generative AI.

Murphy Campbell thought she was safe. As an independent folk musician with a modest following, she assumed she’d flown under the radar of AI’s more predatory uses. Then January happened.

Campbell logged into her Spotify artist profile and found songs she’d never uploaded. They were her songs – traditional folk tunes like “Four Marys” that she’d recorded – but something felt wrong the moment she hit play. The vocals sounded like her, but not quite. According to The Verge’s investigation, someone had pulled her performances from YouTube, ran them through AI voice cloning tools, and uploaded the synthetic covers to streaming platforms under her actual name.

“I was kind of under the impression that we had a little bit more time,” Campbell said, her shock evident even months later. She’d been watching the AI music debate unfold around major artists like Drake and The Weeknd, never imagining independent musicians would become targets this quickly.

The Verge ran Campbell’s song “Four Marys” through two separate AI detection tools. Both came back with the same verdict – probably AI-generated. It’s a chilling confirmation of what many in the music industry have feared: AI voice cloning has become so accessible and convincing that anyone with basic technical skills can impersonate any artist whose voice exists online.