Photo Credit: Nicole Ditt
As the latest in what feels like the never-ending struggle between artist and AI, Lorde has lent her voice to speak out against Spotify’s implementation of AI-generated song summaries. As Pitchfork reports, the singer-songwriter shared an Instagram story on Thursday, July 16th expressing distaste for the About the Song feature.
The feature, implemented in February, uses AI to create a written summary of the currently playing song. In addition to highlighting inaccuracies in the summary, Lorde also criticized the feature as limiting the ability for fans to interpret the songs. In the post, she showed and criticized a summary of “Current Affairs,” where the song had incorrectly been attributed to a moment from a 2025 tour where Lorde removed her clothes to have a dancer pour water on herself – said moment actually occurring during the track “GRWM.” “Not only is this inaccurate (not the song I did that in) but reducing a song to an AI-generated meaning right at the source feels like it limits free interpretation IMO,” read her post. “At least make it possible for artists to opt out please.”
Responding to Pitchfork, a Spotify spokesperson stated “We built ‘About the Song’ because fans want to dig into the stories behind the music. It’s still in beta. The info comes from articles across the internet, and when something’s off, we move fast to fix it, like we did here. Getting it right matters to us.” The feature, launched into a beta in February, comes after Spotify had claimed to be cracking down on AI music which had swarmed the platform. AI and musicians have had a strenuous relationship since the dawn of the burgeoning technology, with much discussion and controversy over the ethics, necessity and general quality of the tech’s implementation, with Spotify being one of the platforms often on the receiving end of this critique. Lorde herself has been a vocal critic of AI, recently sharing a vulgar rebuke of the recent Meta AI glasses.
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