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.
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.
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 sure but I generated this and it’s something I really like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPYk3zjDY-o
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
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
literally the theft of talent and the absence of effort.
You’ve just described 100% of the record labels.
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?
The last one is the most obvious one. But they’re getting better at concealing it.
I don’t listen to anything made after about 2010. I don’t have these worries.
I only watch YouTube videos from pre 2010. You probably wouldn’t know them.
They were produced in Canada, after all
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.
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 :)
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 know somebody who likes using these GenAI tools for images and music now. It’s too easy to recognize the style after a while, and it annoys me every time
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 …
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. 🤨
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.
You must consider that the AI “helping” the artist is built from the stolen work of countless artists.
I feel like this is conflating two separate arguments.
Is AI music good, versus is AI music moral.
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.
Look, the guy has a point. This is a very real metaphysical conundrum. Who would’ve guessed that we would have a whole new metaphysical conundrum to sink our teeth in in 2025?
It’s an important conversation, and interesting. I have very strong opinions on art, but I can’t quite wrap my head around how to relate to AI generated art.
I can’t quite wrap my head around how to relate to AI generated art.
Simple. It’s not about art at all. But about “artists”.
Let’s use an example. Let’s say that you’re a rich person and you want to hire someone to paint a landscape portrait for you. You tell them in detail exactly what you want and they go and do it. Does that make you an artist? Of course not. It makes you the procurer
So if we replace that hired painter with a computer, does that mean that because no human artist was involved that the title of “artist” automatically reverts to the procurer, meaning the person that told the computer what to do? No.
Regardless of who (or what) creates the art, the person telling them/it what to paint isn’t a damn artist and doesn’t deserve any financial reward.
Is art about the artist?
In terms of credit and monetary compensation it most certainly is.
Your contention is, as far as I understand, that a person who uses AI to create AI art, is not an artist. Ok. I don’t think so either, necessarily.
But when you use the word “deserve” you also make another argument, which is financial and political in nature, which is a qualitatively different proposition. I don’t disagree with you there either, necessarily.
I am not taking sides by the way. Like I said, I have not been successful in navigating the problem space enough to have a single strong unified position on all of it, just bits and pieces, not strongly, and the pieces don’t fit.
so that if it sounds really good they know whether to shovel hate at it anyway
I think this is a genuinely valid question.
Babies don’t complaint about the little turtle with lights that sings tunes while going around and around.
Like the horse feared, it was replaced by a cart that doesn’t need a horse and not by horses driving cars. Thr music industry will be replaced by AI music made by a bunch of guys in a basement. It’s Okay. Some people will still sing during dishwashing, showers, in the car, and at karaoke night.
