The BBC's Director of Music, Lorna Clarke, has published a blog post setting out how the broadcaster's radio stations and platforms will handle AI in music. Artists who use AI tools can still be played, but the BBC will favour music that reflects meaningful human creativity.
Clarke draws the line at what a person contributes. AI should support a musician's idea, not replace the work of forming it, and she says prompting, picking from or lightly editing AI output will probably not count. Anyone submitting music to the BBC must now say whether and how AI was used, because audience research suggests listeners want to know. The BBC also says it will never knowingly broadcast AI music that infringes existing works.
CMU questions whether those promises can be kept. The industry has no agreed way to declare AI use on a release, detection tools are unreliable for AI-assisted tracks, and if the copyright pledge covers tools trained on unlicensed music, many popular tools would fail it. The report recalls criticism last year when a regional BBC Introducing show featured an AI-generated track as its artist of the month.
Sources · 1