Gemma Hayes on becoming a victim of AI fraud: ‘It feels strange and odd and dangerous’

“It just came out of nowhere. I felt sick.”On Monday, Gemma Hayes discovered she had become the victim of AI fraudsters after they added music purporting to be written by the award-winning singer-songwriter to her Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube accounts. “I went online and saw that I had apparently released new music on all my streaming platforms: Apple Music, Spotify, my YouTube channel,” Hayes says. “There was new music from me, which was not me.”“My manager was trying to call me. He texted going, ‘Please call, there’s been a deep fake AI thing with your music’.”READ MOREHayes has released six studio albums over her career and become well known for a distinctive blend of spare indie rock, careful vocal phrasing, delicate electronica flourishes and occasional My Bloody Valentine-esque walls of noise. She was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2003 and her most recent album, Blind Faith, was released to acclaim in 2024.The fraudulent music seems designed to fool a casual fan into believing it could be from the west Cork-based singer-songwriter. The three ‘new’ tracks: Taxi to Piccadilly; Champagne and Cheap Perfume; and Melancholy in Stereo are all in the indie pop-rock vein. On the first, against a bright upbeat guitar rock backing, a woman sings, ‘Hey driver, step on the gas, we’re making red lights turn to green real fast!/ Taxi to Piccadilly, don’t go slow.’ On Champagne and Cheap Perfume, a woman intones, “I am counting up my missing pence/Tucking threads inside my tailored coat/Making desperate economic sense.”The reaction from Hayes’ audience has been one of confusion and disappointment. “This was pushed as a notification from Apple Music to me yesterday so I got quite excited and then I listened and realised it was not yourself,” wrote rackmani4 on Hayes’ Instagram feed. Another fan (@_edenphotography_) said: “It was pushed as new music on my Spotify account yesterday. I actually listened to all three tracks in full just trying to make sense of your ‘new’ sound.” Another fan, @fintan_scanlon, added, when he learned it was not her, ‘Phew I thought you had gone off your rocker’.”“The dangerous part of it is that it’s got drums, bass, electric guitar, a female vocal,” says Hayes. “They are all things I have on my tracks. I would love if it was a completely different genre because then it would be obvious. It’s bland, generic, soulless music.”The music arrived online on Sunday and so far Hayes and her management team have been unable to get the three songs taken down despite contacting each of the streaming services separately. Hayes is also listed on the songs as a player of drums, jazz horn and pedal steel guitar.“The fact of something or someone or a group of people impersonating me feels so unbelievably wrong and criminal. It’s going on to a public platform. Every day it’s up there, to me it feels like more subtle damage is being done. It discredits me as an artist.”Hayes is among a growing cohort of artists who are being targeted on streaming platforms by fraudsters. The likelihood is that the songs appearing on the platforms have not been crafted by actual artists, but by AI bots. The fraudsters in this case, says Hayes, appear to be coming from an Indonesian entity, credited as Composer & Lyricist. The bulk of royalties accruing for downloads will typically go to that person.While international names such as Drake have been targeted in the past, it is a more common experience for mid-tier artists like Hayes, who has around 200,00 streams on Spotify per month. This is partly because they lack the support structures to fight back easily. “They avoid major artists because they usually have the software to block this. I don’t have the software,” Hayes says. “I was thinking, did my password get hacked? My manager said it has nothing to do with the password. Basically it fools the platform. It says ‘Gemma Hayes, new music’, it can fool through AI, and it gets tucked in under my profile.”Hayes is currently working on an acoustic album that she hopes to release in the new year. The arrival of this fraudster music has made her feel that she has lost control over her networks.“There’s no standard protocol for this. I don’t know where to go, how to stop it from happening again. I feel like the guinea pig. I don’t even have the words for how strange and odd and slightly dangerous this feels.“Spotify was very quick to respond, but it’s still up. The platforms need to do better. They should have a process where that music is immediately taken down.”