Last month, award-winning singer Emily Portman got a message from a fan praising her new album and saying "English folk music is in good hands".

That would normally be a compliment, but the Sheffield-based artist was puzzled.

So she followed a link the fan had posted and was taken to what appeared to be her latest release. "But I didn't recognise it because I hadn't released a new album," Portman says.

"I clicked through and discovered an album online everywhere - on Spotify and iTunes and all the online platforms.

"It was called Orca, and it was music that was evidently AI-generated, but it had been cleverly trained, I think, on me."

The 10 tracks had names such as Sprig of Thyme and Silent Hearth - which were "uncannily close" to titles she might choose. It was something that Portman, who won a BBC Folk Award in 2013, found "really creepy".

When she clicked to listen, the voice - supposedly hers - was a bit off but sang in "a folk style probably closest to mine that AI could produce", she says. The instrumentation was also eerily similar.

While AI-generated music is rife online, it's often released under fictitious names, or imitates big stars, but it doesn't normally appear on their official streaming pages.

There's now a growing trend, though, for established (but not superstar) artists to be targeted by fake albums or songs that suddenly appear on their pages on Spotify and other streaming services. Even dead musicians have had AI-generated "new" material added to their catalogues.

Portman doesn't know who put the album up under her name or why. She was falsely credited as performer, writer and copyright holder. The producer listed in the credits was Freddie Howells - but she says that name doesn't mean anything to her, and there's no trace online of a producer or musician of that name.

As for the music itself, while it was enough to convince some fans, the lack of actual human creative input made it sound "vacuous and pristine", she says.

"I'll never be able to sing that perfectly in tune. And that's not the point. I don't want to. I'm human."

A few days later, another album popped up on Portman's streaming pages. This time, less effort had been made to emulate her. It was "20 tracks of instrumental drivel", she says. "Just AI slop."

She filed copyright complaints to get the albums taken down, and says the episode has redoubled her........

© BBC