AI-generated songs banned from Australian music charts

Thanks for having me on. Well, AI created music will be excluded from Australia's official music charts from this week. The Australian Recording Industry Association says it'll exclude AI generated music from Friday, unless it's substantially human made, does not raise manipulation concerns, and uses legal AI services. For more, I'm joined now by our national AI reporter, Cameron Wilson in the studio. Hi there, Cameron. So, what's brought on this move exactly? Yeah, going from you know what's powering AI to what's coming out of AI. This is something that has kind of come out of rumblings around the world about how AI generated music is uh becoming a really big presence. Um it's very easy now to produce AI music. Um, global charts, uh including Australia's have had songs that people either suspect or know to have significant AI parts of it in it, um do quite well. And so a few months ago, uh a global record association put out some rules saying that we think that these are the kind of ways to distinguish between what is a song that uses AI to assist, but it's kind of a human-made song, versus like an AI generated song. And they said either um, you know, associations around the world should follow this if they run charts themselves. And so today um ARIA, which represents uh the record labels in Australia and runs the kind of top music charts, says it's changing its rules uh to exclude um most, like either wholly or mostly produced um AI music. And um one of the precipitating factors I think that's kind of really seems to have um contributed to this, perhaps sped it up, was a song that was the most uh listened to song in Australia that I think we have a clip of now. When you call my name, it's like a little red. So, yeah, that was a song produced by an Australian producer. Um, and the ABC did some reporting on it saying that people suspected that it had AI kind of involvement uh in it, and then later on, the producer behind it actually updated um information online saying that the vocals and drums had AI as part of it. As I kind of mentioned before, this was like the most song, most listened to song in Australia in July, did quite well in the ARIA charts. So clearly we've gone from this you know idea where you know maybe AI will be creating things in the future to now we are actually listening to songs that are being seriously made with AI. And so what does this change mean for artists? So I mean what ARIA says that this is doing is kind of setting a line in the sand so people know exactly what is and isn't considered you know AI generated. Because like it's actually quite a like difficult thing to figure out exactly where the line is sometimes. Um a lot of computing that we use today involves AI. Like, you know, for example, whenever you take a photo with your phone, it uses computational photography, which involves AI. Is that AI generated? Well, it depends who you ask. In this um, you know, area ARIA is kind of setting down these guidelines saying uh unless you can prove that the um music was um made substantially by a human, hasn't had chart manipulation behind it, and it involves AI, they're gonna say that it can't be on the ARIA chart. Obviously, there's ramifications to that, whether it's from you know winning an ARIA award, or to like you know the fact that ARIA charts are used as an indication to the industry, to the to the public, you know, to history as well, about what has been a big song. Um and the other thing is that uh ARIA has also come out and say we hope that the uh radio stations pay attention to this as well, because we want to support Australian creativity, when it will support Australian uh human creativity and artistry, and so they're also now saying we are encouraging the radio stations not to play songs that we call, you know, right, mostly AI generated and instead play real artists. Thank Cameron Wilson, thanks very much. you.