It’s Sad, But Most People Can’t Tell They’re Listening To An AI-Generated Track

I was driving down the street the other day listening to my favorite college FM station when a track came on that made me think, “Is this real or AI-generated?” Most of the other tracks played on the station obviously used real musicians, but this one was very electronic and just a little too perfect. Still, I wasn’t sure if what I was hearing was AI-generated or not.

It turns out I’m not the only one. In a survey conducted by Ipsos across eight countries with 9,000 participants exploring attitudes toward AI-generated music, 97% of them could tell the difference either. Most troubling was that only 52% of them felt uncomfortable with their inability to tell the difference.

When real humans play music together there’s a feel that can’t be duplicated by AI, but when songs are crafted around loops and samples (as are most pop songs today), that’s where the lines begin to blur when AI is introduced.

It’s especially difficult to tell if a loop was electronically generated against a grid so it’s timing is perfect, as opposed to a sample from an old ‘human-based’ record.

Getting back to the survey, “80% of respondents agreed that 100% AI-generated music should be clearly labeled, while 73% of music streaming users said they want to know if their platform is recommending ‘synthetic’ tracks.”

AI + Human

The problem here is that many tracks uploaded today use an AI-generated track combined with a live vocal and/or instrument, so it’s only mostly AI-generated. It’s a fine line between art and synthetic at that point. Does it get labeled as AI? If it can obtain a copyright (it can), the probably not.

All this leads to the fact that it looks like around 50,000 AI-generated tracks are being uploaded a day to streaming platforms. The competition is already fierce with around 99,000 human tracks, but add this extra dose of AI slop and it makes the possibility of a song getting any kind of traction almost impossible.

As much as we criticized the old system of gatekeepers, it was better than this.