“Our playlists are becoming a playground for AI-generated music. And that’s making us uneasy.
According to a new survey of 9,000 people by the music service Deezer and the research firm Ipsos, participants listened to three songs and then had to choose which were fully AI-generated and which weren’t. Nearly all respondents (97%) were unable to tell the difference.
Of those who couldn’t tell, 71% said they were surprised by the results, and more than half, 52%, were uncomfortable that they couldn’t distinguish the AI music. Respondents expressed ambivalence about AI and music: About two-thirds expressed curiosity about AI-generated music, with a willingness to try listening at least once, but four out of five (80%) agreed that AI music should be clearly labeled for listeners.”
mauriciocap on
Even if I’ve been a heavy user of ML since the 90s I also have a hard time telling “genAI” from hand made mediocrity and stupidity!
The set of “music industry crap I try to never listen to” is huge and kept growing since the 60s or before, when they decided they will control all radios, magazines, and force feed the same crap to everyone.
jodrellbank_pants on
Not my problem haven’t bought a record since I was 19
Urgash on
I’m really not concerned by this, as a Metalhead i keep listening the same album from the 80’s and 90’s anyway. I don’t use any streaming services nor listen to the radio, mostly because there is nothing i hate more than other people choosing my music for me.
I might be in the minority, but If AI can reproduce what i haven’t been able to find in modern music for years, i don’t have any issue with it, i don’t have the luxury to wait another 36 years for someone to release something better than “Painkiller” From Judas Priest.
CallMeKolbasz on
At one point youtube decided it was time to feed me some AI generated jazz slop. Don’t know exactly what was different about it, but around 20 minutes in I noticed some deep unease and I had to stop it as it was making me queasy. That’s when I noticed it was AI generated.
I still get the same sensation from time to time. I wonder if anyone has a similar experience.
fwubglubbel on
Well, when most popular music is drum machines, synths and autotune drivel…
monospaceman on
What is the end game here? Making it so we have no cultural artifacts to leave our future generations? We’re forcing young people to skip pursuing the arts because there will be no money in it and all we have is a sea of AI slop that wont move us forward because it can’t actually innovate. We’ll just be stuck in a loop.
I’m encouraged though by the bubbling up resistance you’re seeing in a lot of visual mediums. Every time a company tries to post an AI image the comment sections are usually brutal. It’s a lot easier to sense the “deadness” in visuals than in music. They’re also making it so clear that generative AI in the hands of people who don’t understand storytelling and craft will produce horrendous results.
ididntunderstandyou on
I don’t care so much that I’d be fooled (I would most likely be), I care that it simply exists.
The whole point of art is its humanity. The fact that someone sad down, reach into the confines of their minds, and tuned those (sometimes abstract) thoughts it into something tangible. Art increases our empathy not just with fellow humans, but with other cultures and other times. We see are differences and resemblances. We find disagreement or common ground. We find satire and mockery subtly hidden in commissioned sycophancy. We see in their inspirations who the artist loves and admires and whose work they decided to build on.
Worst than artists who can make highly technical, but soulless and bland art, AI art has 0 emotional value *and* 0 technical value.
Give me a song made by an untalented child and it has 100x more soul than an AI piece that sounds like Mozart.
Being fooled by AI art makes me angry, not because “I’ve been fooled by this song I enjoyed”, but because now, this song I enjoyed has no interesting emotional value to me whatsoever.
What makes me sad about AI art/music is that it makes me realise how passively so many people consume art. That they have no interesting value in placing it in a given context and feel no emotional connection to the artist that made it.
Illustrious-Word2950 on
That’s more an indictment on bad music made by humans than a win for AI.
firedog7881 on
When they’ve been using auto tune since the 90s you can’t tell singer’s real voices anyway
-Big-Goof- on
Not that I’m defending ai but people have been jamming music made entirely on a computer and most of its samples of others work.
I mainly use youtube as my source of online music, and there’s a ton of AI albums. One way of steering clear is only listening to stuff older than one year
Aliteralhedgehog on
That’s not surprising considering “ai” is just a plagiarism machine. It’s not creating new music from the ether here. The beats and melodies are stolen.
Fuibo2k on
To be fair it probably depends on the bands you’re comparing against. Spotify and the radio before that was already awash with music industry slop. No offense, but there are many genres, like Latin pop, that you could definitely replicate with 100% accuracy using python script and a voice generator. Creating a generic version of any genre of music is trivial, which is probably the majority of these popular Playlists. When you get to know specific artists and albums you have a deeper understanding of their sound which probably makes it harder to generate with AI. The ultimate test would be to generate a radio head song and tell a fan its “new unreleased content that just got leaked” and see what they think.
90Carat on
We’ve had drum machines, auto tune, various synthesizers, and now people are surprised we can’t tell if music is ai?
Think_Put8440 on
The 3 percent that recognized the AI music – tell us your secrets.
molinitor on
Yeah, of course we’re mad about it. Art, to me anyway, is about human connection. I don’t give a flying fuck how “good” generative AI gets, the end result isn’t everything, even if capitalism badly wants to pretend like it is. When I walk into a bookstore what makes me happy is the amount of people that decided to tell their story, not the amount of stories there.
9spaceking on
Wonder if they can fake a Queen song, would be wild if people couldn’t tell with the best artists from the past
Lorenztico on
The solution is easy: just not consume any slop made after 2020
roychr on
unfortunately the chords used and normalized has been the same for a long time, even centuries.
JonnyPancakes on
I wasn’t planning on being the old guy that doesn’t listen to any new music, but I think I’m gonna be that guy unless I see the band open for another one I’m already going to see. This is insane.
eggplanthead123 on
The only problem I see is that music making is very much a gatekeeper community. I have no musical talent, can’t keep a beat, but with AI I can now translate my emotions into music without having the raw talent required to make such music.
I became a musician overnight despite never being talented and I see nothing wrong with that
onikaroshi on
Never run across any as I generally only listen to playlists I make myself with artists I’ve listened to for years. But honestly, I’m of the mind I don’t care as long as it sounds good
mikepictor on
This is one of the reasons I switched to Deezer. They purposefully try and label all AI music, and keep it out of algorithmic playlists like discovery playlists.
KenUsimi on
I have a really easy way to determine. I look for concert footage. It helps that i’ve been really getting into bluegrass, metal, and punk recently.
26 Comments
“Our playlists are becoming a playground for AI-generated music. And that’s making us uneasy.
According to a new survey of 9,000 people by the music service Deezer and the research firm Ipsos, participants listened to three songs and then had to choose which were fully AI-generated and which weren’t. Nearly all respondents (97%) were unable to tell the difference.
Of those who couldn’t tell, 71% said they were surprised by the results, and more than half, 52%, were uncomfortable that they couldn’t distinguish the AI music. Respondents expressed ambivalence about AI and music: About two-thirds expressed curiosity about AI-generated music, with a willingness to try listening at least once, but four out of five (80%) agreed that AI music should be clearly labeled for listeners.”
Even if I’ve been a heavy user of ML since the 90s I also have a hard time telling “genAI” from hand made mediocrity and stupidity!
The set of “music industry crap I try to never listen to” is huge and kept growing since the 60s or before, when they decided they will control all radios, magazines, and force feed the same crap to everyone.
Not my problem haven’t bought a record since I was 19
I’m really not concerned by this, as a Metalhead i keep listening the same album from the 80’s and 90’s anyway. I don’t use any streaming services nor listen to the radio, mostly because there is nothing i hate more than other people choosing my music for me.
I might be in the minority, but If AI can reproduce what i haven’t been able to find in modern music for years, i don’t have any issue with it, i don’t have the luxury to wait another 36 years for someone to release something better than “Painkiller” From Judas Priest.
At one point youtube decided it was time to feed me some AI generated jazz slop. Don’t know exactly what was different about it, but around 20 minutes in I noticed some deep unease and I had to stop it as it was making me queasy. That’s when I noticed it was AI generated.
I still get the same sensation from time to time. I wonder if anyone has a similar experience.
Well, when most popular music is drum machines, synths and autotune drivel…
What is the end game here? Making it so we have no cultural artifacts to leave our future generations? We’re forcing young people to skip pursuing the arts because there will be no money in it and all we have is a sea of AI slop that wont move us forward because it can’t actually innovate. We’ll just be stuck in a loop.
I’m encouraged though by the bubbling up resistance you’re seeing in a lot of visual mediums. Every time a company tries to post an AI image the comment sections are usually brutal. It’s a lot easier to sense the “deadness” in visuals than in music. They’re also making it so clear that generative AI in the hands of people who don’t understand storytelling and craft will produce horrendous results.
I don’t care so much that I’d be fooled (I would most likely be), I care that it simply exists.
The whole point of art is its humanity. The fact that someone sad down, reach into the confines of their minds, and tuned those (sometimes abstract) thoughts it into something tangible. Art increases our empathy not just with fellow humans, but with other cultures and other times. We see are differences and resemblances. We find disagreement or common ground. We find satire and mockery subtly hidden in commissioned sycophancy. We see in their inspirations who the artist loves and admires and whose work they decided to build on.
Worst than artists who can make highly technical, but soulless and bland art, AI art has 0 emotional value *and* 0 technical value.
Give me a song made by an untalented child and it has 100x more soul than an AI piece that sounds like Mozart.
Being fooled by AI art makes me angry, not because “I’ve been fooled by this song I enjoyed”, but because now, this song I enjoyed has no interesting emotional value to me whatsoever.
What makes me sad about AI art/music is that it makes me realise how passively so many people consume art. That they have no interesting value in placing it in a given context and feel no emotional connection to the artist that made it.
That’s more an indictment on bad music made by humans than a win for AI.
When they’ve been using auto tune since the 90s you can’t tell singer’s real voices anyway
Not that I’m defending ai but people have been jamming music made entirely on a computer and most of its samples of others work.
This is just the evolution of that.
Simply put if it sounds good people will listen
I can immediately tell the difference. [Probably because I’ve made so much of it myself 😀 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGU2j-sy8rQ)
I mainly use youtube as my source of online music, and there’s a ton of AI albums. One way of steering clear is only listening to stuff older than one year
That’s not surprising considering “ai” is just a plagiarism machine. It’s not creating new music from the ether here. The beats and melodies are stolen.
To be fair it probably depends on the bands you’re comparing against. Spotify and the radio before that was already awash with music industry slop. No offense, but there are many genres, like Latin pop, that you could definitely replicate with 100% accuracy using python script and a voice generator. Creating a generic version of any genre of music is trivial, which is probably the majority of these popular Playlists. When you get to know specific artists and albums you have a deeper understanding of their sound which probably makes it harder to generate with AI. The ultimate test would be to generate a radio head song and tell a fan its “new unreleased content that just got leaked” and see what they think.
We’ve had drum machines, auto tune, various synthesizers, and now people are surprised we can’t tell if music is ai?
The 3 percent that recognized the AI music – tell us your secrets.
Yeah, of course we’re mad about it. Art, to me anyway, is about human connection. I don’t give a flying fuck how “good” generative AI gets, the end result isn’t everything, even if capitalism badly wants to pretend like it is. When I walk into a bookstore what makes me happy is the amount of people that decided to tell their story, not the amount of stories there.
Wonder if they can fake a Queen song, would be wild if people couldn’t tell with the best artists from the past
The solution is easy: just not consume any slop made after 2020
unfortunately the chords used and normalized has been the same for a long time, even centuries.
I wasn’t planning on being the old guy that doesn’t listen to any new music, but I think I’m gonna be that guy unless I see the band open for another one I’m already going to see. This is insane.
The only problem I see is that music making is very much a gatekeeper community. I have no musical talent, can’t keep a beat, but with AI I can now translate my emotions into music without having the raw talent required to make such music.
I became a musician overnight despite never being talented and I see nothing wrong with that
Never run across any as I generally only listen to playlists I make myself with artists I’ve listened to for years. But honestly, I’m of the mind I don’t care as long as it sounds good
This is one of the reasons I switched to Deezer. They purposefully try and label all AI music, and keep it out of algorithmic playlists like discovery playlists.
I have a really easy way to determine. I look for concert footage. It helps that i’ve been really getting into bluegrass, metal, and punk recently.