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.
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”
By a very thin margin, but yes. I’d rather listen to AI slop than the Human slop they try to pass for music these days.
Edit: Ah shit, I realized though that we are just gonna get talentless pop stars using AI instead. So both dog AND cat shit at the same time.
Brave new world.
And here I’ve been thinking there’s been a big wave of great bands lately. Maybe you just listen to crap.
I am talking about the music that gets played in coffee shops, malls, taxis, hotel lobbies, and restaurants all over the world. So yes, I listen to a LOT of crap.
The distinction is between mass produced radio pop and whatever high brow hipster music you’re into.
literally 1984
But also there is still lots of good human music being created, I guess it’s passing under your radar. Ask around, browse Bandcamp, listen to radio (hint: it’s not just local now, check out Radio Garden).
We are already in 1984, if anything AI allows others to make more human music because they dont need to find bands, fund studio time just to get a song to match the lyrics they wrote.
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.”
Edit: On second thought, the above is not a fair comparison at all, and there is a point to the mathematical nature of Bach, I just couldn’t express it in a coherent and snarky way at the same time.
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)
In case you were curious, apparently you can get Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com.
The versifivator is an implausibly close description of LLMs considering how long ago it was written
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.
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.
I looked that up, and it actually slaps. Not really my genre, but I can see how people would assume it’s real people.
The artist is upfront that it is just one person making music, and they say it is AI assisted in their discord.
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
Psyqui is a Japanese EDM artist that has a similar sound. If the melodies and compositions are aigen, it may be a source.
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.
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.
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.
Fuck, I failed the test. I have to wonder if they’re full unsupervised generation though, because one of them had a recurring motif that I know an algo would have a hard time to keep track of. None of it was really my genre anyway, but it still got me good.
I passed, but I’m fairly confident I wouldn’t have if it weren’t explicitly a test. I listened to all of them twice, with the express purpose of identifying the ones that are AI-generated.
Even then, I wasn’t as confident in my prediction as I would have liked.I’ll say, I did enjoy all of them musically, but when I paid closer attention to the lyrics, I noticed something really odd and hard to describe in the ones generated by AI. Like some new kind of cringe. Like it would be embarrassing for a human to have written those lines, but not in a relatable kind of way. Not in the usual “I’m embarrassed for you” kind of way.
I was torn between “I hope this isn’t AI, I’m vibing with the music” and “I hope no human wrote these lyrics”.The whole exercise also shattered my perception of my own taste in music - I liked all of the AI-generated ones and I’m not happy about it.
You have yet to notice an AI-generated song that didn’t have some obvious tells.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a515IaGVSmE&list=RDMMa515IaGVSmE&start_radio=1
I thought this was real
I was looking for videogame remixes one day and found a channel doing Little Nemo from the NES. I used to love that game and thought it was an odd pick for remixes, one you don’t see too often so I clicked on it and … it was incredibly underwhelming. I listened for a few minutes and something was kind of off but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It was AI of course.
I’m not much of a music person, I’ve been listening to it daily for my entire life but I don’t know much about theory. Still, when it comes to remixes, you can usually tell why someone remixed a song. They like that particular song, or there’s a motif that really struck them. They’ll pick out certain sounds or elements and build on them, single them out and rearrange them. It’s very intentional and you can tell.
AI-generated remixes lack this intentionality. It was like someone had twisted a dial that just said “complexity” and that was it. There were more intricate layers of beats and instrumentation on top, but it wasn’t doing anything. I sat there and listened for 15 minutes and it was like I heard nothing. Nothing new stuck in my head, there was no riff or little melody that made go, “Aw fuck yeah! This is what it’s about!”
That’s how you can tell AI generated music.
Sadly, a lot of slower and minimalist genres have been decimated by it though. Vaporwave, chillcore, dungeonsynth. A lot of these had large bodies of work to train on and it’s a lot harder to tell due to their subtler nature, but you’ll usually notice the artist has a new hour-long upload every day. If you click through it at random, you’ll begin to notice that while the tones shift, the overall pattern of the entire hour-long mix is still kind of the same?
It’s bleak, man. Fuck that shit.
This is kind of irrelevant to the argument, but if I were to provide you with a mix of AI and organically produced music, would you be able to pick them out every time?
It’s a bit like Andy Warhol’s “Brillo box” art installation. Is it just a Brillo box he got at the store? Or did he make it himself, thereby creating “art”? Could you know the difference? Would you?
As a fun aside, a permanent exhibition of one of “his” Brillo boxes turned out to be fake (well, real, if you think about it, which is kind of the point of that piece of Warhol’s art), and there was a huge investigation into who had taken the “original”, but people had been coming and seen the exhibition for decades at that point, not knowing it was actually just a Brillo box.
I think this touches on the complexity of the issues presented by AI that is actually a pretty ancient philosophical debate around art, meaning, and value.
This is kind of irrelevant to the argument, but if I were to provide you with a mix of AI and organically produced music, would you be able to pick them out every time?
I’d like to think much more often than not, yes. People talk about it being able to replicate low level pop and … fine. But that’s not really the kind of stuff I listen to. Maybe there’s a statement to be made there about how far down pop has fallen that it can be mistaken with formulaic AI slop …
It’s a bit like Andy Warhol’s “Brillo box” art installation. Is it just a Brillo box he got at the store? Or did he make it himself, thereby creating “art”? Could you know the difference? Would you?
Which I guess is what your point here is. What is art and who is the arbiter of that?
Kind of different circumstances as I see it, though. Andy Warhol still performed the art of the Brillo box. He took something basic and skillfully crafted it into art to prod the artistic community into considering what we think of as art and why. It was in no way a trick but a very deliberate and intentional statement, or question even.
AI on the other hand often feels like a trick. There is little to no intention, no human craft, and an effort to pass it off as a higher form of art than it really is. It’s not asking questions or making statements but an effort to deliver “content” to fill some need. The need for more content.
But like, hey. That’s just my opinion, maaan …
Do you know why I listen to real artists? Because there is a story behind it, someone had an inspiration and wrote a fucking good album. AI has no story to tell, didn’t broke up with someone to write a song, and certainly won’t make star gaze the live concert I went to.
And here I was only listening to music because the of the joy I get from some producer getting more and more percentage of the profits. Maybe I should rethink my reasoning…
You may unfortunately have a terminal case of retail investor brain
Shhh, quiet! Otherwise they might get kidnapped by trump’s goons and put on an executive seat!
Ah yes the story written by ghost writers so the marketable front “artist” for the label can sell brand deals and ads when that “artist” goes on tour and does interviews. People using AI can still write their own lyrics and make music based on the same inspirations you say makes real music. If anything this frees the ghost writers who might not have a great voice or ability to play instruments well but has phenomenon lyricism can plan a good musical set to make their own albums and be free from the oppressive labels.
Speaking of the popularly artists like Taylor Swift? I totally understand, yet, there are artists that really create music. Still, AI, can’t do a live.
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.
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
deleted by creator
Sometimes experimental/improv groups can basically make an album a day if they put their mind to it. Often live recorded with minimal post processing. It’s far from mainstream but it can be surprisingly popular among the right audiences.
Haven’t checked out this particular project but it’s possible
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
- 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.
My first experience with AI music was when I was on my usual 90s hip-hop/rap vibe and got recommended some channels with alleged underground hits. There definitely were a couple channels that put out legit mixes that did have a lot of music and artists I didn’t know prior, but one of the mixes was weird. I could tell immediately, less than a minute in, mainly because of the vocals that sounded super generic as well kind of robotic in addition to a very out of place beat that doesn’t sound at all like it’d belong in the 90s/2000s era of rap music. Had it not been for the vocals in tandem with the mismatched beat (obviously created by someone who doesn’t know jack about the music genre and the ear it’s supposed to represent), I might not have spotted the AI involved.
The scary and sad part is that I doubt YouTube will do anything about it despite reports and that there are so many people that either don’t care or don’t know/realise. Only saw like one or two other comments calling out that mix having been made with AI
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.
AI imitates an overall sound. But doesn’t care much about “instruments” individually. For simple minimal segments it can easily lay down a simple clear beat or melody. But as more gets added. The more the sound becomes muddy and generic. That and if you’re familiar enough with a given instrument. It can often just sound “wrong”. Again because the AI is imitating a sound, not an instrument generally.
But yeah. The other points stand. Social media presence and output are great indicators.
Midnight Darkwave is one I’m highly suspicious of. Super generic name. Not much presence beyond the streaming sites. I like the overall sound, but it often gets muddy and kind of droning. And not in the coldwave sort of way. Something a bit more inhuman, over processed, and mechanical.
I can see a creative use for Suno Studio where you can feed it a clip of a chord progression you recorded, have the AI generate a few extrapolations, then arrange bits and pieces of it within Suno Studio to create the basic song structure and finally export the midi to your DAW. Basically, you can use it as a fancy sketchpad.
The problem I can’t get past is the environmental impact.
Absolutely, AI is just a tool. It can be used for good things and for bad things. And there are technologies currently being worked on outside the circle jerk Ponzi scheme of all the tech oligarchs right now to make it less environmentally impactful. They just don’t care and are rushing to make every last buck they can before the bubble pops.
AI is just a tool. It can be used for good things and for bad things.
Huh. I wonder which it’s gonna be!
Right now, mostly bad. But there are definitely some good things. Lots of new exciting science and such being enabled by it.
Right? I used to use… Don’t remember what the app was on Android, but it was like a fun little beat studio, it could generate random patterns according to styles, and randomize instruments too. So you’d get a loop, then you’d tweak it and switch our instruments and sounds and whatnot, and then when I found a nice rhythm, I recreated it in Ableton or FL Studio or whatever.
So, let’s say you use Suno to make a good beat. You import slice and dissect the beat and sounds, and I fail to see how it’s qualitatively any different than using sample or loop packs, which basically every fucking musician on the planet does.
“Are we so different, you and I”? :)
I have used Suno quite extensively just for fun, I insert my own lyrics and let it create different styles and beats, and you have to push out like 30 before it does something actually decent, but some of them are fucking bangers. I consider it like watching visualizations in WinAmp.
I am not stating a moral proposition in either direction, just an observation.
I like to ask it to generate lyrics based on funny prompts. For example, I asked it to write a song from Darth Vader’s perspective about the fact that he never actually said “Luke, I am your father”. The results was just savage.
Hey Luke
I heard you kissed your sister on Hoth
I’m not mad
I’m just curious
'Cause I never kissed mine
Did you like it? Did she like it?
Do you regret it? Do you feel gross?
Did it feel weird when she kissed you?
I know that you never kissed beforeShe got a man (Ooh)
You got a hand (Ooh)
And maybe you should stick to what you know
Oh
You need to know\I am your father (I am your father)
Luke
I am your father (Luke, I am your father)
No
I never said that
I never said that (No, I never said that)
NoThat… Is… Not very good.
BUT! Let’s say that you took that and used it as a scaffolding for an idea. Let’s say you kept some parts, rewrote some other parts, in the end coming up with something much better than the original.
Did you write it, or did the robot?
How much would you have to change for it to be “yours”? Where’s the cutoff point?
I’m just posing this as a general metaphysical conundrum, I don’t take a position other than deconstructing underlying arguments.
Fucking shit. I am starting to sound like a god damned AI.
I just thought it was funny that it decided to brutalize Luke all on its own.
She got a man (Ooh)
You got a hand (Ooh)
And maybe you should stick to what you knowAlso, the incest thing was all the AI. I just asked for a song about the fact that Vader never said the line “Luke, I am your father”.
Well then it is not only bad but wildly off topic, because what you got there is a cheap diss track missing a lot of opportunities.
“Hey Luke I heard you kissed your sister on Hoth”
I mean right there you’ve got something rhyming with “hot”. But anyway.
I think that if you don’t know literature and art, dumb literature and art seems genius. And that’s where we’re at as a society.
I use Qobuz, but is Spotify the only service that shamelessly promotes ai music?
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.)
Garth Brooks has never been on streaming (except Amazon)
Garth Brooks is available on every single music streaming service I know about. 🤨
