How Much Curation Should We Expect From Platforms?

This week Spotify reported that they removed 50 million AI generated “slop and spam” music tracks from their platform. It’s the latest move in their year long effort to prioritize “authentic, human artists” and portray itself as a platform more friendly toward actual musicians. Primarily, the tracks removed were ones reported as spam or frequently skipped by listeners, and Spotify has promised to employ “many signals to help it detect slop and spam, such as metadata, user feedback, upload patterns and third-party AI detection tools.”

Amazon deals with the same problem through a flood of AI generated books on their platform, and also suggests they are doing something to help remove those books. Experts suggest it’s significantly harder to eliminate the slop in music where there are lots of platforms, versus Amazon which could more easily use their monopoly position to largely eliminate this problem. Their “limits” which include reducing the number of books a single account can publish to two per week are still minimal. It’s hard to imagine anyone who publishes two books per week NOT publishing complete slop. The question that both situations raise, though, is what responsibility we should expect platforms to have when it comes to authenticating content or making sure that it passes a certain bar of quality. Retail sites like Stockx have a model here that may be worth copying. The site, which promises to give you “access to the world’s most coveted items in the smartest way possible,” has a sophisticated product verification process that allows them to guarantee that a product you buy on the site is real and not counterfeit. They require sellers to verify their identity, they physically inspect goods and they offer a trusted third-party intermediary to create real trust on their platform. As a result, fraud is minimal and people love the platform. Imagine if Spotify or Amazon used at least some of these similar features on their own platforms. As an author, if I could complete a verification program that would allow books authored by me as a real human to be authenticated, then people could use this as a search vector for books. Spotify could have similar features. Social media platforms could largely eliminate the slop from bot farms and fake accounts doing the same thing. The point is, the technology for this sort of verification exists. We just need to demand that more platforms implement it.