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.
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If you can’t tell the difference and it fits how you listen to music, I guess who cares?
AI software writing up musak doesn’t matter to me because I don’t listen to music that way.
I’ll know the bands I’m listening to are real because I will have manually downloaded their music after reading reviews, magazine articles, or things like albumoftheyear.org just like I’ve been doing for the last half decade.
Music streaming services suck and not only because they will promote low cost bands to you. If you actually give a shit about music then stop being so lazy as to have an algorithm fill your trough with slop and then being surprised that it’s AI slop.
Or just continue eating the slop if it pleases you. 🤷
It’s a bit of a contrarian take, but I think people need to start adding more intentionality to how they live their lives. If music is unimportant to you, that’s fine. But nowadays everyone just watches the shows they’re recommended, listens to the music that is picked out by the algorithm, and reads what is fed to them in their feeds…figure out what’s important to you and curate it for yourself.
idk they are different and both good. right now im listening to my own manually composed music because the long complex note structure actually has meaning and is pretty. Sometimes I listen to my ai songs because they can be pretty in their own way too, especially my fey song and my necromancer one where her voice does a superinteresting highly emotional energetic thing i would never have dreamed to put in one of my own songs. Also sometimes I like playing music on piano or viola. There are many types of music. I like alot of them :)
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)
Why should anyone care whether music is AI generated or not?
so that if it sounds really good they know whether to shovel hate at it anyway
Look, I hate AI as much as the next person, but honestly, I think a lot of AI music is better than whatever dumb shit they play on radio literally all across the world.
Text AI is meh.
Image AI is meh.
Video AI is not bad.
Music AI is pretty good.
Hasn’t been existed since forever like hatuni miku or teto
I haven’t listened to new music in over a decade. That includes hearing songs by contemporary artists. Everything sounds the same as it always did.
This is the “I only listen to nirvana” teen in its ultimate form.
But he knows not what it means
Lol this is how pop music is created with formulaic, focus group approved garbage over engineered to be the most palatable and sell well.
If that gets killed off along with AI-generated music, that seems to be to be win/win.
I genuinely think AI music is better than the shit they play on radio.
“Dog shit is better than cat shit”
The only thing more formulaic is Bach, who wrote music mathematically.
Hahah he didn’t exactly write according to a formula. That’s like saying “yeah jimi hendrix is pretty formulaic, because he just plays guitar, with a limited number of chords and strings.”
I have yet to hear an AI generated song that didn’t have some obvious tells in the vocals. Like how you can hear autotune, but it’s even worse than autotune. Crackly/crunchy, heavily distorted but only on certain words. Weird pronunciation or annunciation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a515IaGVSmE&list=RDMMa515IaGVSmE&start_radio=1
I thought this was real
You have yet to notice an AI-generated song that didn’t have some obvious tells.
There’s a pretty well known studio engineer that has a YouTube channel. He did a bit where even he couldn’t tell the difference.
We’re cooked at this point. There is really no need to bother learning a creative skill outside of it being just a personal desire to do.
There will be no money or career opportunities in the field of entertainment and arts.
Hard disagree. I will never pay a single penny for any form of LLM-generated “art,” because the whole point of art is to share in something meaningful to the creator. There is no creator with generated slop. It’s all just unthinking and unfeeling mass plagiarism.
I thought that too until I started listening to music that was AI generated and I had no idea. It’s pretty much over. There really isn’t anything unique anyway in human made content
I fell hard for Dysmn, who was suspiciously dropping new music every few days. I really liked the sound, and I haven’t found anything that sounds like that since. 270+ videos in under 2 years. I realized it wasn’t human after a month or two.
Soooo, if anybody knows a great jazzy EDM metal noise, let me know.
Check out a band called Unprocessed. I just found them after they did a collab with Polyphia’s guitarist, another band to check out. It really sounds like this style.
You are the second person to recommend Unprocessed. Almost 10 minutes into the Angel album. It’s pretty good, definitely hits the target.
I’ll have to check out Polyphia as well.
Can’t say any legit bands that sound exactly like that, But some of the guitar and metal notes sounds inspired by Polyphia, Playing God (sorry for the yt link) might scratch your itch, otherwise look up the math rock genre, might find some gems there. Wish you the best of luck!
Gonna make a quick edit, Unprocessed 100% deserves a recommendation in this genre. Occasionally have some EDM but mainly more on the metal side, but still have some extraordinary strings akin to Polyphia
I’m enjoying a lot of Unprocessed’s Angel album. I’m also going to have to look at Polyphia and Playing God.
Math rock is one of the ways they advertised themselves. Also djent, but I’m not seeing that.
I looked that up, and it actually slaps. Not really my genre, but I can see how people would assume it’s real people.
Humans are primarily visual creatures, so we can detect the slop in AI images a LOT faster than we can in audio.
Human artists are going to have to get a lot weirder to out-innovate AI music, and I’m actually happy about that. Weird music is the best.
I think this might be a way AI and humans can actually work together. A lot of musicians are creating digitally anyway. They might have to rely on drum loops if they aren’t good at beats. Iterating with an AI to get the right beat would be better than a loop, and still be a human making it.
However, I have reservations about the AI doing everything with little or no human involvement.
Iterating with an AI to get the right beat would be better than a loop
That’s just like, your opinion
Right, pretty sure everyone but you knows it’s an opinion.
I think (think means opinion) most people, besides you, would agree that having a beat that is unique and not just downloaded from a loop library will produce a song that is more original.
“In my imagination I speak for all people and we all think I’m right” chatGPT is literally rotting your brain bro
“The main issue musicians are struggling with is originality; AI can help :)” get a grip. Notice how in order for you to insert “ai” into this process you have to construct a fantasy where a totally uncreative person lazily drags a low quality beat into their project without a further care in the world? The root of your little fantasy here is simple and inescapable: AI is only appealing to boring, uncreative, soulless people. I know it, and you know it, which is why out of all the limitless possibilities your first argument is that it would be superior to something you already consider shit.
Strawman much?
“I refuse to have a polite conversation” - you. It’s exactly what you said, because it’s in quotes and I know how to use quotes. Hah.
I disagree.
If a person plays guitar-but not piano, and they feed their track into an AI and ask it to generate a backup piano track with specific instructions about how it should sound, they should be… denied that?
What should they do if they want a track that involves an instrument they can’t play? Hire someone? With what money? lol.
The artist is upfront that it is just one person making music, and they say it is AI assisted in their discord.
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.
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.
77 albums since 2018?
It’s AI. No question.
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
I use Qobuz, but is Spotify the only service that shamelessly promotes ai music?
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.
If AI removes the skill and expertise required to perform a task, it’s fucking trash
If a vocalist can’t play music, they should find people that can, and work with them. If they use AI, they’re are trash.
You must consider that the AI “helping” the artist is built from the stolen work of countless artists. Regardless of use case, the tool only exists due to theft. Plus, this tool exists as a way to not pay talent for content.
Since the bread and circuses machine must keep dispensing to keep the masses anaesthetized, the elites need a way to cut the costs or they will lose points are their net worth scorecard and get made fun of by the other billionaires.
Not to mention, AI is a shortcut that does not generate skills besides prompt engineering. We have research proving this with students and the labor force losing reasoning and straight memory by handing off to “AI”. Part of being a musician is the effort and practice and knowing an instrument. Asking the clanker for a tune because learning takes too long or is too difficult goes along with what the article says for detecting it. The work will be emotionless and have no soul. Musicians are allowed to make choices for their music, of course. AI rounding out an artist’s tools is what it is. I view the tool as a corrupting force but, it’s their perogative. But people without no knowledge or skill for making music cranking out these generic sounding similacra to make money is always going to set my teeth on edge.
Edit: spelling and tense correction. Revision and expansion of idea to express less derision.
