There's a person behind it: Spotify's "AI Persona" badge, my name and why I sign what I make with AI

This autumn the platforms have started labelling music made with artificial intelligence, and there is one label that has made me think more than the others. It is not about songs. It is about people. Or rather, about whether there is a person behind an artist profile at all.

Spotify announced it on 11 August and began showing it in mid-September. It is called "AI Persona", and it goes on artist profiles whose public identity is an AI-generated persona: a photorealistic face, a biography, a name, and nobody of flesh and blood behind it. Those profiles, according to the platform itself, are left out of its editorial and algorithmic recommendations. And there is a sentence in the announcement I read twice: the badge is about the artist's public identity, not about how the music was made.

On its help page, Spotify gets even more specific. The badge does not apply if you use AI tools to make your music but your artist profile represents a real person. To explain how each song was made, the platform already had other pieces in motion, such as credits on AI use. This one is different. It is the first that does not look inside the song, but at whoever signs it.

That is me. My name is Mike Saint Louis, I live in Madrid and I call myself the first AI singer-songwriter. I write all my lyrics, I direct every song, and the music and vocal performance are created with artificial intelligence tools. I have said so from day one. And this badge, which many people may see as a technical detail, has helped me put in order something that had been on my mind for a while: what it means to sign my own name to music I make with machines.

A label that doesn't look at the studio, it looks in the mirror

Until now, almost the whole debate about music and AI revolved around the tool. Did anyone play it? Did anyone sing it? How much is human and how much is machine? They are fair questions, and each platform is trying to answer them in its own way. Planeta Gayfolk already went through October's labels, and I won't repeat them here.

What strikes me about "AI Persona" is that it changes the question. It no longer asks what the machine did. It asks who shows their face. Whether the artist in the photo exists, whether they have a life, whether there is someone to write to, to complain to, to thank.

And that, for me, is the important question. You can argue for hours about whether a song made with AI is "real music", and I have written myself about what AI can't do in my songs: irony, camp, double meaning. But one thing is beyond argument. A song needs someone to answer for it. Someone who says: I decided this.

The background noise: a year full of artists who don't exist

This is not an abstract worry. This very week NPR published a report with a title that says it all: whether 2026 is the fakest year in music. It cites a dizzying figure from Deezer: in June, AI-made songs were already more than half of what was uploaded to the platform every day, yet they accounted for less than 3% of streams.

In other words, there is an avalanche of tracks that almost nobody listens to. And inside that avalanche there are invented profiles, with invented faces and invented biographies, trying to pass as artists to sneak into playlists and collect royalties that are not theirs. I think it is good that platforms act against that. More than good. Because every fake profile that takes a stream takes it from someone who does exist, whether they use AI or not.

And in Bilbao, at the BIME fair, the same thing was discussed in other words this week. According to El Correo, AIE, the body that manages the rights of performers in Spain, will present a code of good practice on AI in music on 25 November. In that debate a phrase came up that I really like: "artistic identity". So did voice cloning, which is exactly the flip side of what I want to defend here.

What stands behind my name

When I say there is a person behind my name, I don't mean it as a slogan. I mean it because it is all written down, and anyone can check.

On my biography page I explain that I am a lyricist, composer, producer and art director, and that I run my own label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS. I explain that in 2024 I went viral on TikTok with "Tan Cateto". I explain that I spent twenty years in two relationships with narcissistic partners, and that many of my lyrics come from there. And I tell something that is not easy to put on a website: that I have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, severe major depression, social phobia, avoidant personality disorder and anxiety, and that I have professional help.

No invented face comes with that. A profile generated to fill playlists has no medical history, no exes, no song that got away from it on TikTok. It has a pretty name and a perfect photo. What gives it away is not the image, it is the emptiness behind it. Ask it where a song comes from and there is nobody there to answer.

There is something else I have that an "AI persona" doesn't: an address where people can write to me. My email is on my contact page, and the press page has my press kit, photos and interviews, and my biography lists coverage from CharlyFM to Revista 360º. One of those pieces was titled, precisely, "From musician to ecosystem: building a 360-degree artistic identity without a big structure". Artistic identity again. The phrase seems to follow me.

My face, with social phobia

Here comes the part that is a little harder for me. Showing my face is not a natural gesture for me. Social phobia is not shyness, it is something else, and I already wrote about social phobia and the empty rooms of Planeta Gayfolk, and that song, "Contact Overwhelms Me", whose title says what sometimes happens to me with contact.

When I write a lyric, nobody is watching me. That is the easy part. The hard part comes later, when the song comes out and with it comes my name, my story and, yes, my face. At that point I no longer control who looks or how.

That is exactly why I understand the temptation to hide behind a character. It would be more comfortable. An avatar doesn't get nervous, doesn't read the comments, doesn't spend the night going over a nasty message. If someone with my diagnosis and my craft decided to create an invented artist so as not to be exposed, I would understand. But that is not the decision I have made.

My decision is the opposite: that the name is mine, the story is mine and the responsibility is mine. The images that go with my songs have style, costumes, fantasy and plenty of pink planet, because Planeta Gayfolk is a universe and I like it to show. But the one who signs is not a character. It is me.

When the insult comes with my name on it

Showing your face has a price, of course. I already wrote in the piece about the insults my music gets for being made with AI that some messages start by talking about AI and by the second sentence are talking about me being gay. Those messages reach a person. Not a profile. Me.

An invented artist doesn't take that hit. A server receives it, and a server feels nothing. And although I wouldn't wish it on anyone, I think that hit also says something: that what I publish has someone behind it who can get hurt. That is what answering for your work means. The good and the bad.

It also means being able to doubt. Some days I wonder whether what I do is worth anything, whether I have the right to call myself a singer-songwriter. I put a name to that in the impostor syndrome of the AI creator. Doubts are also proof that someone is there. An invented persona has no impostor syndrome. It simply is an impostor, and doesn't know it.

What I do ask of the platforms

It is not my place to tell Spotify how to do its job, and I don't know from the inside how it decides who gets each badge. What I know is what it has published: that artists can declare their situation and appeal if they think a mistake has been made. That seems a good basis to me.

If I had to ask for something, as an independent artist who uses AI and says so, it would be three simple things.

First, keep distinguishing between the artist's identity and the tool they work with. That is the great virtue of this badge, and I hope it isn't lost. Lumping a farm of fake profiles together with a lyricist who writes about his own life would be a mistake.

Second, credits that say who wrote the lyrics. In my songs the lyrics are mine, and that is what I most want people to know.

Third, always a human route to correct errors. Because automatic systems make mistakes, and those who suffer them most are usually the ones without a big label behind them. I do have a label, yes, but it is my own and I run it.

What won't change

Whatever happens with the labels, there are things about the way I work that don't depend on any platform.

I will keep writing my lyrics. I will keep listening to dozens of versions of each song until I keep the one that sounds like what I had in my head, something I explained in the ear as editor. I will keep saying that I use AI, because I have never hidden it and I am not starting now. And I will keep offering my music as a free download, so that anyone who wants to listen doesn't have to go through any till.

Nor will the place I write from change. I am a gay man from Madrid telling my own story, without claiming to speak for the whole community, as I explained yesterday in "I'm nobody's spokesperson". That first person is exactly what an "AI persona" cannot have.

There is someone behind it

I like that the badge exists. Not because it will change the way I work, but because it forces a question I find more honest than the usual one. Not "did a machine make this?", but "is anyone here?".

In my case, the answer is yes. There is someone writing in Madrid, who has been through hard things, who has professional help, who gets nervous around people and who, even so, has decided to put his name on everything he publishes. The machines help me make the music. But the one who gets it wrong, the one who gets it right, the one who receives the insults and the one grateful for every kind message is me.

If you want to check, my email is on the contact page. There is no avatar behind it.