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.
Is AI audio accurately able to recreate shitty auto tune that everyone uses?
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
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
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.
Maybe people with be more protective of their art from here on out and stop trying to make a mill off of clout.
We gave the tech companies or data. We are reaping the consequences.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
- dumbass nonsensical lyrics
- bland basic bitch tone
- superfluous background music
- digital voice that sounds like it’s been through a syth incorrectly
The last one is the most obvious one. But they’re getting better at concealing it.
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.
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!
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
I don’t know if people are still making sampled music, but this thought occurred to me the other day.
What if I prompted certain phrased, riffs, and hooks that never existed instead of making a complete song.
Then I made a song using samples in my work.
Is this a new song? AI? A mix? Seems plausible that someone is doing this now.
I pretty much only listen to live music anymore anyways, because everything else is so produced it might as well be AI.
Procedurally generated music is already a thing, the difference would be the procedures - and how much of the final form that is dictated by you versus derived as an average of earlier works as a seed value. Usually procedurally generated music is almost entirely controlled by the musician’s inputs except for random seeds.
Is this a new song? AI? A mix?
Just send kinda sad that you’d give up trying to make up new riffs and stuff, seems like a really fun and important part of music
I personally am not I was just thinking about what that end result would be.
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.
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.
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
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)
The versifivator is an implausibly close description of LLMs considering how long ago it was written
In case you were curious, apparently you can get Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com.
