At the top of Spotify's viral chart is an artist created by AI.

The journey of neo-soul singer Sienna Rose to the top of streaming service charts was surprisingly quick. Pop star Selena Gomez on Tuesday, January 12, after the Golden Globe awards, shared several photos on her social media, accompanying them with the song Where Your Warmth Begins by the yet-unknown singer Sienna Rose. The posts garnered over one and a half million likes, and Rose's monthly listeners began to grow rapidly. By Thursday, she already had three tracks on the daily-updated Viral 50 chart, which Spotify includes songs that attract attention on social media.

However, the story was too perfect to be true. Sienna Rose is most likely a creation of artificial intelligence – either Spotify didn't notice or chose not to notice.

Last fall, the competing streaming service Deezer announced that more than a third of the content uploaded daily to the platform is produced by artificial intelligence. To prevent problems, they started using software that detects AI content and subsequently labels it. A tag warning of AI-generated content also appeared on Sienna Rose's latest album Honey on the Moon, released at the beginning of last December. Moreover, the recording is listed as a collaboration with the reggae band Let Babylon Burn, which also raises serious suspicions that it is merely an AI creation.

Sienna Rose does not exist on social media, has never performed live, and there are no records of any planned performances. Her portraits on album covers appear generated, and the unreal amount of material she released last year—two albums and two EPs—is suspicious. The accompanying text on her profile also looks like a product of generative software: “With a voice so gentle, expressive, and deeply emotional, she creates songs that sound both timeless and intimate, like a quiet conversation wrapped in melody.”

Just listen to the songs themselves, which could serve as a definition of generically average R&B and neo-soul with shallow lyrics. Further evidence is provided by an investigation by Rolling Stone magazine. Yet, the apparently non-existent Sienna Rose has amassed nearly three million listeners in the past month, and speculation about her true existence has not harmed her popularity in any way.

In many ways, this case is similar to that of the band The Velvet Sundown, about which we wrote last summer. Despite all evidence that it is an AI creation – which even the creators admit in their accompanying texts – their vintage psychedelic rock, assembled from elements of 70s bands, is listened to on Spotify by over 200,000 listeners each month.

The demand for shallow and unoriginal music clearly exists. That is probably also the reason why Spotify has not actively intervened against AI-generated content so far. If listeners are satisfied and pay, ethics take a backseat. When TechRadar asked Spotify's spokesperson in mid-January why the service has not yet implemented AI-generated content labeling, the response was: “AI development is progressing rapidly, and it is not always easy to distinguish AI from non-AI music. Spotify focuses on protecting against harmful uses of AI, removing spam and duplicate content, and strengthening protection against unauthorized voice cloning.”

The reluctance of Spotify to label AI content only adds to speculation that the platform uses generative technologies to produce its own content, which the algorithms then feed to listeners. Its main advantage is obvious – there is no need to pay real human creators for it. A completely opposite approach was taken by Bandcamp, which on January 14 announced that it would uncompromisingly remove all AI-generated content from its digital store. “We want musicians to continue making music and for fans to be sure that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans,” the platform stated in a statement posted on Reddit.