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Grammy-winning singer Arooj Aftab thinks artists are owed compensation for the use of their tracks in training artificial intelligence (AI) models.

She posted two stories on her Instagram account on Tuesday in which she shared a post from United Musicians and Allied Workers — a trade union of professionals in the music industry. The post in the first story demanded AI-generated music be labelled at all steps to differentiate it from human-made tracks.

Aftab said AI was using human-made music to make its own, which impacted the musicians whose music it trained on and used. She said any future rule-making on AI use in music should be mindful of this.

In her second story, the singer shared a slide from the post calling for streaming platforms to pay human artists directly. It also asked for the same payments not to be extended to creators of AI-generated music.

Aftab said musicians should be entitled to payments even now as their work is being used to train AI to make music, which she said counts as usage of their work.

The singer also said musicians should be entitled to royalties if their work is used to make new work — aka derivative work.

The industry’s fight against AI-generated music is not new, with over 13,000 artists — including ABBA’s Bjorn Ulvaeus and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke — signing a statement in 2024 condemning AI’s unlicensed use of human-made music.

And in February last year, over 1,000 musicians — including Kate Bush — released a silent album in protest of the UK changing laws to allow AI to use copyrighted material like songs and books to train.

Spotify has been active in the fight, introducing “Verified for Spotify” labels for creators who were verifiably human and not just bots on a computer. The streaming platform also introduced “AI Persona” badges for creators who are making AI music.

In a newsletter released on Tuesday to mark a year since they announced these steps, the streaming giant said it had removed over 50 million “slop and spam tracks” from people’s recommendations.

Spotify also said it had verified over 300,000 human creators, over 70 per cent of whom were independent artists. The streaming service said 99pc of user searches were for human-made tracks.