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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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. 😋Could just be Count Rugen though.
davie504 be like
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t listen to anything made after about 2010. I don’t have these worries.
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
If you can’t even tell if it’s ai and you enjoy it then I fail to see the problem.
No issue if it’s labelled as AI. Since you should enjoy it regardless.
Fair point.
I don’t think it’s okay to present it as human made if it’s not
Simple, the problem is the erosion of human directed art. That is a much broader problem than if the music is good or not; it may be. But we want, many of us anyway, humans making and being recognized for making art. Empowering this expression is less likely if everybody begins consuming only machine made works.
The machines arent making art in a vacuum they take human input and thus are still human directed art. Do you realize how many “artists” use ghost writers? All ai does is allow those ghost writers to now produce their music without needing some PR tool from a big label to pretend to write the music and sell it. All AI art really does is break the vail that any of the art for the past few decades was actually art and not just pr and marketing from big corporations. Now instead of people getting mad at the industries that caused all that enshitification they are taking it out on people who are using tools to express themselves in ways they may not have had raw the musical or artistic skills to do so in the past. Now that doesnt solve the energy consumption issues that arise with AI which is a big issue but use of AI itself is not whats eroding the human spirit in art, that was done by corporations turning art into another commodity to exploit. With the way capitalism is that erosion of human spirit has and will continue to happen with or without AI.
There is probably some truth to that, but I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I think both can be erosive to human expression at the same time.
Not sure but I generated this and it’s something I really like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPYk3zjDY-o
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 :)
lol if you can’t tell then it literally doesn’t matter. If your concerns are ethical, then you should be consuming only indie music from unsigned artists so, again, it literally doesn’t matter.
If your concerns are ethical, then you should be consuming only indie music from unsigned artists
…who could be using AI, lol.
I’d hope someone who allegedly cares so much about where the music they listen comes from would do the appropriate due diligence. Otherwise it’s just contrarianism.
Why should anyone care whether music is AI generated or not?
Because if no actual artist was involved in its creation, I’m not giving money to a corporate suit who pushed a few buttons on a computer.
so that if it sounds really good they know whether to shovel hate at it anyway
