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.
Counterpoint: 97% of Listeners Couldn’t Tell AI Music from Real Artists, Based on Blind Tests
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.