How can you tell if music is AI-generated?

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 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.

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. 😋

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.

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.

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

• dumbass nonsensical lyrics
• bland basic bitch tone
• superfluous background music
• digital voice that sounds like it's been through a syth incorrectly

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'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 use Qobuz, but is Spotify the only service that shamelessly promotes ai music?

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.

https://youtu.be/oOJ0En2u5DQ

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.

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.)

Generally it is incredibly bland even blander than regular mainstream music.

I don't listen to anything made after about 2010. I don't have these worries.

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.

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… 🫠

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.

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

Because it's better than the shitty music record labels are spewing these days. It's pretty bad when computer generated music is better than some plastic pop tune "composed" by 12 "producers" who pieced together samples from 30 pieces of classic music recorded by legendary musicians, then stuck some pretty manikin in front to provide a voice to be digitally manipulated until it can be crammed into the mix.

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 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.

Is AI audio accurately able to recreate shitty auto tune that everyone uses?

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.

If you can't even tell if it's ai and you enjoy it then I fail to see the problem.

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.

I haven't listened to new music in over a decade. That includes hearing songs by contemporary artists. Everything sounds the same as it always did.

Not sure but I generated this and it's something I really like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPYk3zjDY-o

Why should anyone care whether music is AI generated or not?

Look, I hate AI as much as the next person, but honestly, I think a lot of AI music is better than whatever dumb shit they play on radio literally all across the world.

Text AI is meh.

Image AI is meh.

Video AI is not bad.

Music AI is pretty good.

Edit: Wow, tough crowd, tough crowd. I stand by what I said.