A survey published last week suggested 97% of respondents could not spot an AI-generated song. But there are some telltale signs - if you know where to look.
Here’s a quick guide …
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No live performances or social media presence
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‘A mashup of rock hits in a blender’
A song with a formulaic feel - sweet but without much substance or emotional weight - can be a sign of AI, says the musician and technology speaker, as well as vocals that feel breathless.
- ‘AI hasn’t felt heartbreak yet’
“AI hasn’t felt heartbreak yet… It knows patterns,” he explains. “What makes music human is not just sound but the stories behind it.”
- Steps toward transparency
In January, the streaming platform Deezer launched an AI detection tool, followed this summer by a system which tags AI-generated music.
Tip 1: It’s being promoted. The music industry would love to get rid of musicians.
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com programmes, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian lit- erature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimen- tal songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a ver- sificator. (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Tour)
Not really they love having the human front to the ghost writers they employ today to make you feel like you connect to the artist so when they push brand deals and marketing you buy the products they made deals with. This if anything frees those ghost writers to actually make their own music without the shackles of a corporation breathing down their neck.
The drummer sounds like he has to many arms.
And the guitarist and the keyboard players sound like they clearly have more than 5 fingers on each hand. 😋So Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford? /s
davie504 be like
Could just be Count Rugen though.
Rush?
That’s blasphemy!!!
I’m just saying. I hear about a drummer with 6 hands, it’s gonna sound like Neil Pert. Dude is part octopus.
You’re right. I miss that guy a lot. Every once in a while I’ll watch a ton of his videos in remembrance of his crazy talent.
Drummers very often sound like they have too many arms. Multiple percussion tracks can be layered, and also, that’s kind of the point of trickier drum beats.
- dumbass nonsensical lyrics
- bland basic bitch tone
- superfluous background music
- digital voice that sounds like it’s been through a syth incorrectly
You just described 64% of all human-made music.
even shit music takes effort and talent.
AI is literally the theft of talent and the absence of effort.
even shit music takes effort and talent.
Hm, not really unless you consider effort anything that’s non-zero.
I just shat my pants.
I just shat my pants.
Shit got so itchy,
I just shat my pants.
There you go. It took me 10 seconds of effort to come up with that masterpiece. Where’s my Grammy?
literally the theft of talent and the absence of effort.
You’ve just described 100% of the record labels.
The last one is the most obvious one. But they’re getting better at concealing it.
This description of AI songs could be a lament about most pop music: formulaic, sweet, generic, produced in a studio to sound perfect, not human. Works on radio or Spotify, but not so much for a live audience.
Sure, that’s hard to detect. AI reproduces what we’ve been exposed to for decades.
Bullshit. This only applies to fully prompt generated AI music. Tracks that heavily rely on AI based tech as a part of the process are harder to catch, and tracks that only use AI for mixing and mastering are impossible to detect.
I made a track but used AI to autotune and morph my voice to that of a woman’s. It even allowed me to tweak the expressiveness of the voice. The track is 95% human made but the vocals are AI modified. I’m willing to bet that the ration of AI use in a lot of pop music and EDM is a lot higher.
PS: I make music for myself, as a hobby. I just wanted to make something to share with my friends. If you want real music, try bands like Wet Leg, IDLES, GEESE, etc who lean into making low tech music.
EDIT: Thia is an example of a song that is fully generated by AI. All that was fed to the prompt were the lyrics. The AI did everything else itself, including picking the genre. I shared it with a few people to see who’d figure out it was AI slop.
Compression throws me off.
That AI ‘hiss’ is ringing it my ears, but its very, very similar to YT uploads that have been re-encoded like 10 times. Which is a lot of them.
Out of curiosity, I made spectrograms of the AI song and concert that sounds ‘clean’ yet kinda noisy/compressed to me. I won’t tell you which one is which:
Source song, if you are curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MydFq0io-tQ
That song was a mistake that got generated when I pasted the wrong clipboard into Suno’s Lyrics window on my phone and accidentally submitted it. It has not been processed at all. Suno has a “Remaster” feature that when you are happy with the generated song you can give it a few automated “mix and mastering” passes to generate a cleaner and more dynamic sound.
I’ve mainly used Suno to mess about so I didn’t want to pay for the upgrade.
If there’s ever a need, you could try whatever open generation models use for post processing.
I’m in the camp of, “if it’s good, why should I care?” However, I’m all for transparency! Passing off AI-generated music as human-generated is fraud. Be honest!
There’s a LOT of grey areas though. If you’re a vocalist and you’re using an AI-generated background? How’s that any different from pressing “play” on a sequencer or even an audio file (of some sequenced or drum track)?
If you’re a lyricist, the actual music isn’t as important as the lyrics. Does it matter if they used AI to generate the music or should every lyricist be forced to pay someone to make the music for them or master an instrument (or sequencer)?
What if you’re trying to translate your music into a different language and use AI to translate it? Is that AI-generated music? You can give your whole damned song to AI and it’ll convert to a different language in-place without having to re-record it. It even uses your singer’s voice!
To me, it’s incredible technology and it’s enabling artists of all kinds to do cool things with their music. It seems rather paternalistic to suggest someone’s creativity doesn’t “count” if they didn’t sweat or spend years practicing to create it.
I’ve been trying to figure out if Stone Rebel is an AI band or not. They started in 2018 and have put out something like 77 albums since, but it’s relatively simple instrumental. They have almost no information online except a claim that they’re “based in France”
Honestly can’t tell if they’re a legit yet very private group, or if they were early adopters of procgen music
AI wasn’t making anything close to listenable music in 2018. If they have songs from before 2023 they’re human.
all the album art is ai and there’s no mention of them touring or anything. Bandcamp also allows ai artists, and that’s where I found their album art
Generally it is incredibly bland even blander than regular mainstream music.
I use Qobuz, but is Spotify the only service that shamelessly promotes ai music?
Okay okay. First off, fuck AI yeah. But if it’s becoming this indistinguishable where you need to go looking for tells that it’s AI I don’t think it’s fair to call it bad music, just how it got there is bad.
It’s like listening to Kanye West. Graduation is amazing but fuck him.
Humans have made a lot of shitty, uninspired music as well. So it could mean that AI-generated slop is indistinguishable from human-made slop, in which case, it would still be bad music.
Paul McCartney’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” was the first thing that popped into my brain upon reading this. Not sure if it is relevant, but felt like it was worth noting.
Why? Is it because it’s considered a masterpiece or a bad song?
Hard disagree, because it’s like with all the other forms of AI-created slop - with the real thing there’s layers of meaning, and you spend time and mental energy digging into that and getting something from it. But as with AI art and AI prose, you try looking closer at it and it just makes you feel hollow and frustrated at having wasted your time.
There was no meaning, there was no symbolism, there were no clever literary allusions, there was no interplay between the melody and the lyrics, it’s just superficial garbage that tricks you into giving it attention by sounding good on its first listen.
(Edit: lol touched a nerve with some shit talentless musicians)
I listened to Kanye for years before he publicly became a Nazi and I don’t think the breadth of his mind changed overnight.
I spent years defending his off-putting public personality because his music touched me from the start.
I really think our pattern seeking monkey brains are easily tricked enough to find meaning in a pile of garbage if we believe hard enough and AI represents this, not proves against it.
If you compare AI ‘slop’ with great works of course its easy to dismiss it and bash it. But there is more human crap out there made each day than there is great works. Music, images, video, texts, all of it. For each piece of great work there is that you find, theres hundreds if not thousands of not so great works that are out there. AI works can be anything from 100% no human involvment besides the initial prompt. They can also involve time and work to get the prompt just the way the user wants. It’s going to end up with more people being able to create more things. Not everyone can draw, or play music, or make movies. Not everyone has the time or money to put everything together thats needed to make something like a good song or a good movie. AI tools are going to give more people those chances, and yes there is going to be slop, but theres already been slop for decades that was all 100% human being made, that had no meaning, no symbolism, no clever literay allusions. So what exactly is the problem with people using AI generate something?
But there is more human crap out there made each day than there is great works
And now, thanks to AI, we can expect 100x more shit to wade through! Great success!
Not everyone can draw, or play music, or make movies. Not everyone has the time or money to put everything together thats needed to make something like a good song or a good movie.
If the author does not want to spend time learning and doing, then I don’t want to spend time checking whatever they asked an AI to do.
So what exactly is the problem with people using AI generate something?
Lower barrier of entry for profit-seeking bullshitters. A significant usage of AI is done by people wanting to profit off it somehow. SEO optimized garbage sites, videos that get lots of views on yt/ttk/insta, playing spotify on repeat forever.
Oh, there’s also the problem of all the deepfakes that people WILL believe, whatever the intent was: revenge porn, political manipulation, trolling.
If the author does not want to spend time learning and doing, then I don’t want to spend time checking whatever they asked an AI to do.
Not everyone has the luxury to spend time learning those skill sets. Should the single parent who had a dream to make art who is getting crushed by capitalism, works 3 jobs to make ends meet and literally doesnt have time to learn there passion without starving not also deserve to be able to express themselves? What do you want only the privileged rich people who have time to dedicate large portions of their life without impact on their finances to be the only ones putting out art? How does someone like Taylor swift who’s whole career came about because her parents could spend so much money on getting her training and paying for studio time in some of the most expensive studios more deserving of getting to make art because of circumstances most people dont have the opportunity to participate in?
Lower barrier of entry for profit-seeking bullshitters
Oh no poor people might be able to make money off of art instead of only massive corporations that effectively already killed the human spirit in art already. Oh no someone who may have gone to school for art so they can express themselves may no longer be able to get a job at an ad company where their love for art gets extinguished as they have to constantly make soulless logos for mega corps based on advise from advertising psychologist who define what will tingle peoples brain more to make them want to consume more.
The problem your scared about already happens but is dressed up as human expression today by pr departments because people do it. If anything AI art would counter that because now more people will be producing things for the sole reason of expressing themselves instead of needing to take a soul crushing job eroding the expression of their craft for a corporation to make up for the years of debt they incurred by going to school to follow their passion only to find out the field they went into is a farce.
Oh, there’s also the problem of all the deepfakes that people WILL believe, whatever the intent was: revenge porn, political manipulation, trolling.
People believe anything already, people believed random hearsay in the past. The only counter for any type of manipulation like this whether being based in deep fakes or just someone spewing nonsense on a pod cast is critical thinking skills. AI doesnt change that one bit, if someone doesnt want to think critically about something they wont, they don’t need AI today to practice cognitive dissonance and blocking AI wont stop that behavior only focusing on education and critical thinking skills will.
Glad to see that you lack an understanding of scale, that explains a lot.
Should the single parent who had a dream to make art who is getting crushed by capitalism, works 3 jobs to make ends meet and literally doesnt have time to learn there passion without starving not also deserve to be able to express themselves?
They’re not expressing themselves if all they’re doing is the equivalent of a boss telling a worker to do something. This is also called “commissioning an artist”
Oh no poor people might be able to make money off of art instead of only massive corporations that effectively already killed the human spirit in art already. Oh no someone who may have gone to school for art so they can express themselves may no longer be able to get a job at an ad company where their love for art gets extinguished as they have to constantly make soulless logos for mega corps based on advise from advertising psychologist who define what will tingle peoples brain more to make them want to consume more.
This whole paragraph is such a display of bad faith that I can’t even figure what’s your position. My best guess: a lot of words to dodge the problem.
The problem your scared about already happens but is dressed up as human expression today by pr departments because people do it. If anything AI art would counter that because now more people will be producing things for the sole reason of expressing themselves instead of needing to take a soul crushing job eroding the expression of their craft for a corporation to make up for the years of debt they incurred by going to school to follow their passion only to find out the field they went into is a farce.
Yeah, nothing like getting a soul crushing job that doesn’t involve art, so that my artistic spirit can remain unfulfilled forever while I pretend to boss around a prompt and think I did something. Refer back to my first point of this reply.
People believe anything already, people believed random hearsay in the past. The only counter for any type of manipulation like this whether being based in deep fakes or just someone spewing nonsense on a pod cast is critical thinking skills. AI doesnt change that one bit, if someone doesnt want to think critically about something they wont, they don’t need AI today to practice cognitive dissonance and blocking AI wont stop that behavior only focusing on education and critical thinking skills will.
It’s a matter of scale. That you failed to grasp something so simple says a lot.
I don’t mind if the work is generated by AI. A dude could randomly pour some ink on a paper and try and sell it to me. If I like it, I’ll buy it.
My issue with AI is the fact that it harms people, and I wish I was exaggerating.
I dreamed of a future like this one when I was a kid. But not at the expense of mass layoffs and the benefits going to a few folks.
Do you think AI music or art is just people putting random words into a prompt to get an output? AI music still allows people to feed their own lyrics into the output so there can still be plenty of layers to the lyrics, people refine the beats and rhythms to match what they are feeling so emotion still comes through. People who make good AI art use it as a base and mash it up, refine prompts and find what matches what they feel, they are just using a different brush than people in the past. It also allows more people to participate in art than we have had in the past, aside from the environmental impacts of AI which are a problem, use of AI in art is just another tool for expression. Its good which means even the slop ends uo looking and sounding better than the non ai slop counterparts but that doesnt detract from the fact people put emotion and thought into making good art even if they incorporate AI into their workflow to do so.
Frequency.
A couple months ago, I found a really cool remake of one of the songs from KPop Demon Hunters. Everyone was doing covers of those songs, and many of them were indie artists, and I was rolling through them. So I found this video, and the video was just an image effect on the cover, which looked very AI-generated, but it’s just the cover image, right? Who cares about that? I asked them in the comments if they would release their stuff on Apple Music. And they quickly responded — no, they’re going to leave that money on the table, and have decided to stay exclusive to YouTube. Why would an artist choose to do that? Sure, a couple artists pulled their music off all other streaming platforms when they made their own, or their friends did. Garth Brooks has never been on streaming (except Amazon, I think they’re the only one whose ethics he agrees with or something?). But most indie artists are on all the platforms. Maximise revenue. So these people saying no, not only to Apple Music — maybe they didn’t like Apple kissing up to Trump — but also to Spotify, Amazon, Deezer, and all the rest. Turns out most of those platforms are stricter when it comes to AI music.
But here’s the thing — their songs are still by the original artist. They’re just stripping out the lyrics and putting new music to the lyrics. And that music is AI generated. Or so I later learned. I looked more into the YouTube channel, and they say they will make you a cover of a song, in any style you like, for $200. And they have hundreds of uploads… in a few months. Each song may have five or six variants. And the songs are still fine, but they have a generic, plastic, not real feel to them.
Of course, they also qualify the first thing in OP’s summary, no social media presence. They just have the sales site, and the YouTube channel.
But maybe it’s fine, or at least less bad, that they’re taking existing songs and just remixing them with AI? Only they’re saying the covers are better, and they’re monetising the videos, so they’re getting paid for the streams when that money should be going to the original artist. It’s fine if they actually covered the song and recorded it, but having a computer do all the heavy lifting? Just seems scummy.
I’m not going to name & shame, but if you look up KPDH covers and see something that looks like AI slop with click-bait titles… you’ve probably found the right one. (They cover other stuff too, not just KPDH.)
I don’t listen to anything made after about 2010. I don’t have these worries.
I will admit, I can maybe tell if a video is AI and can listen when something is AI (the way it speaks and the formulaic feel are dead giveaways for me), but often cannot tell if written word is AI. I am not looking forward to its technological improvements… 🫠
I once read an article that answered my question as “yes” in the first paragraph, then as a “no” in the following paragraph. And I was mad for having fallen for AI-made bullshit.
Maybe people with be more protective of their art from here on out and stop trying to make a mill off of clout.
We gave the tech companies or data. We are reaping the consequences.
Last time I heard ai generated music an immediate tell for me was the vocals, for some reason they just sound a little bit off. Not off key, but similar to a “robot” voice filter maybe? Of course, just like AI generated images that tell will probably be “solved” soon
