As we emerge from Spotify Wrapped season, many will agree that this past year’s recaps looked a bit … different, disappointing some who proclaimed this iteration a “flop” due to over-reliance on generative AI, barely a year after Spotify’s conspicuous layoff of 1,500 people.

This sort of narrative is not unique to the music industry. It’s an ongoing conversation across sectors: How do companies strike a balance between AI’s benefits and its human cost? How should AI be regulated? And who is responsible for policing AI while we work out the answers to these questions?

A balancing act

The potential AI offers is well-documented: the intelligent automation of clerical tasks and advanced decision-making, increased capacity to process and infer from data, and the ability to mimic human creativity.

The real-world implications here are significant. Publications have questioned, for example, “will we still need software developers” in a world where AI can write code or, in the legal industry — where even junior associates may bill nearly $1,000/hour for the sort of legal research and drafting that AI is already becoming adept at replicating — whether the billable-hour will remain viable (or ethical).

Qualms about AI, too, are well-documented: ethical and moral concerns centered on bias, privacy and job loss; environmental concerns; and existential concerns about the displacement of human labor by nonhuman models trained on the output of those very same humans they seek to mimic (or replace).

Related: AI Agents Are Becoming More Humanlike — and OpenAI Launched a New One in January. Are Entrepreneurs Ready to Embrace the Future?

The regulatory dance

The collective uncertainty clouding today’s largely pre-regulated AI landscape is not altogether dissimilar from past technological disruption. Those familiar with the music industry, for example, will recall the uneasy transition to digital streaming, seemingly cannibalizing revenues derived from paid downloads. Downloads had themselves risen to prominence as something of a defensive maneuver — an attempt to salvage something in the post-Napster world, which had thoroughly destroyed the CD-driven sales boom of the 1990s. Even the CD itself was only the last of many dominant 20th-century music technologies to rise and fall. In each instance, the industry adapted and survived.

In some cases, the industry’s internal response happened in a vacuum; in others, legislative, regulatory or judicial actions shaped that response — from recent legislation tailoring licensing practices to the realities of streaming, to 1990s and 2000s case law clarifying the rules surrounding sampling, all the way back to WWII-era consent decrees imposed upon licensing societies formed by rightsholders in the early days of radio.

In each of those cases, though, the response from the applicable branch of government came several years after the industrial rise of the relevant technology. The same is likely to be true of AI. Scores of AI bills are currently stalled before Congress. Dozens of AI-focused lawsuits, too, continue to inch through the judiciary. At the regulatory level, there is significant uncertainty as to how the looming shift in Executive control will affect AI policy, even as current regulatory efforts by the U.S. Copyright Office to propose AI policy recommendations have already fallen well behind initial deadlines.

This is going to take a while to sort out. n the interim, industries will continue to experiment with new ways to use AI. And bad actors will find new ways to exploit this underregulated frontier.

Related: AI Could Ruin Your Life or Business — Unless You Take These Critical Steps

Who’s minding the store?

Meanwhile, absent an effective regulatory schema, industries are left to self-police those bad actors. But whose job, exactly, is it to do that?

In the music industry, there are a number of practical realities that are particularly attractive to fraudsters: a sprawling streaming ecosystem where millions of tracks are uploaded monthly; the billions of hours of music that are streamed each year for fractions of a penny; and a convoluted licensing regime where the streaming services best-positioned to police fraud often pay a blanket percentage of revenue (rather than per-stream) to license music, and thus are perhaps less incentivized to police fraud than the individual creator whose share of the overall streaming pie necessarily narrows when fraudulent slices of that pie disappear, but who has no realistic means to counter that fraud.

In one high-profile example, an individual was indicted for using AI to create music distributed under fake “artist” monikers and then again using AI-powered bots to inflate stream counts and drain around $10 million from the royalty pool available to legitimate creators. The fact that someone may have scammed the music industry for monetary gain is not surprising; that’s a tale as old as time. Two things are noteworthy, however: The alleged fraudster in this case turned to AI only after traditional methods of fraud had floundered; and it took nearly six years for his scheme to be flagged by an industry licensing entity (and it may have altogether eluded many of the streaming services themselves).

Federal prosecution notwithstanding, even this example is just a drop in a much larger bucket of AI-powered fraud that either goes entirely undetected, or goes undetected for longer than would be the case if the incentives and the ability to police fraud were aligned or if an effective regulatory framework to police fraud existed.

Related: Nearly Half of Americans Think They Could Be Duped By AI. Here’s What They’re Worried About.

The human touch

While one can understand why businesses across sectors want to embrace AI in their zeal for efficiency, these recent headlines caution against an absolutist approach. AI is an answer, not the answer. Though it can be tempting to lose patience with governmental entities lagging behind industrial experimentation with AI, regulators and the regulated alike should proceed with caution, balancing both innovation and integrity, both efficiency and human-centricity — not simply because it is the right thing to do, but because we have plenty of examples for why abandoning that approach is self-defeating.

Both art and fraud derive from human ingenuity, and the effects of both are experienced by real human beings. Even if both can be enhanced or disrupted by AI, both are fundamentally human endeavors. As AI’s infancy transitions into an uncertain adolescence, industries and regulators alike should act accordingly.

It’s not just sour grapes.

Most New Yorkers want the option of buying wine in grocery stores and bodegas — and they may finally see things change after years where all they could do was red-red whine.

A new state bill would make it legal for supermarkets to stock wine, upending a longstanding restriction that limits most sales to liquor stores and has many shoppers confused over why it even exists.

“The liquor stores probably want to create a monopoly,” Jamaica, Queens mechanic Anthony Green said laughing. 

“They both can do their thing … no need to shut anybody out.”

An eye-popping 83% of New York City voters said they support allowing supermarkets to sell wine — as do 78% of all residents statewide, according to a new poll.

The survey, conducted by Siena College, shows the growing support to boost accessibility to the fermented grape is going to make it more difficult to limit where wine can be sold.

The question is whether lawmakers will act this year after previous efforts have ended with politicians putting a cork in the debate with no action.

“We support selling wine in our grocery stores. It would expand the brand of wine — particularly wine made in New York State,” said John Catsimatidis, whose Red Apple Group owns the Gristedes Supermarket chain.

Big Apple grocery stores already sell beer and even some wine with low alcohol content.

Forty other states — including the District of Columbia — already allow wine sales in their grocery stores, advocates say.

But not everyone is ready to toast to upending the current law.

Liquor store merchants are digging in their heels, not willing to give up their exclusivity without a fight.

One booze merchant said grocery stores should stay in their lane and sell food, and let liquor store owners sell wine and spirits.

“I am totally against it. We are liquor stores, that’s our business, that’s what we sell. Let us handle it,” Jimmy Kishor, manager at Best Liquors on Hillside Avenue.   

“They should stick to selling food. We can’t sell food. We can’t sell water. We can’t sell beverages. We can only sell liquor and wine. The bottom line is why should they sell our products if we can’t sell theirs?”

Previous efforts to change the law may have been sunk by simple politics.

Industry sources said liquor merchants had a powerful ally that politicians, mostly Republicans and some Democrats, were unwilling to cross. Longtime chairman of the state Conservative Party Mike Long, who died in 2022, was a Brooklyn liquor store owner.

Politicians coveting the backing of the Conservative Party in order to nab an extra ballot line may have not wanted to come into conflict with the leader, as extra ballot lines could often be the difference in swing suburban and upstate districts, insiders said.

But Fanny Maldonado, who owns the 947 Deli Grocery in Jamaica, Queens, said the more wine available, the merrier.

“If I want to sell it, I should be allowed,” said Maldonado, who sells a few low-alcohol wine beverages.

The “New York State of Wine” coalition — which includes grocery stores, the Farm Bureau representing wineries and the New York State Business Council — lauded the overwhelming public support to expand access to wine.

They are backing the latest legislation — sponsored by Sen. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) and Assemblywoman Pamela Hunter (D-Syracuse) — that would allow New Yorkers to buy wine in grocery stores and encourage the sale of New York-made wines by slashing the stores’ annual license renewal fees based on their sales.

The measure, if approved, restricts the sales to grocery stores with a minimum of 5,000 square feet of floor area.

This provision eliminates smaller convenience stores, drug stores, gas station mini-marts and corner delis/bodegas.

Also, 65% of a store’s sales must be food-related to sell wine, thus eliminating big-box retailers and superstores – which may have grocery sections.

The restrictions would reduce the number of stores eligible to sell wine from 9,000 in prior legislation to 1,900.

Meanwhile, the bill could open up new opportunities for New York winemakers and grape growers to sell their products.

New York is the third largest wine producing state in the country after California and Washington and has the four most wineries.

But very few wines made from the Finger Lakes and Long Island are showcased in liquor stores in America’s largest market, New York City, as The Post previously reported.