A folk musician had her voice cloned by AI – and her recordings claimed by a copyright troll.…
A folk musician, Murphy Campbell, discovered AI-generated covers of her songs on Spotify and later faced copyright claims on her YouTube videos, highlighting concerns about AI's impact on music copyright.
- Incident date
- Jan 2026
- Target
- Murphy Campbell
In January 2026, folk musician Murphy Campbell discovered AI-generated covers of her songs had been uploaded to her Spotify profile without her consent; later, copyright claims were filed against her YouTube videos. The incident underscores growing concerns about AI's role in music copyright and potential exploitation of platform systems.
What happened
Campbell found AI-generated covers of her songs on her Spotify profile, and surmised that someone had scraped her YouTube performances, used AI voice-cloning tools, and uploaded the results. Separately, someone filed copyright claims against Campbell’s YouTube videos, asserting ownership over recordings of material that, if they matched Campbell‘s, would be her copyright. The underlying compositions were in the public domain, but Campbell's specific performances and recordings are separately copyrightable. The copyright claims were filed via the Content ID system of distributor Vydia. Vydia stated that the user responsible had been banned and the claims had been released.