Most listeners can’t tell AI music from real songs: Study

Straight Arrow News

Watch Most listeners can’t tell AI music from real songs: Study - Straight Arrow News on Dailymotion

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00:00Take a listen to these three snippets. I want you to guess which songs are produced by humans

00:05and which are produced by artificial intelligence.

00:20Well, I tricked you because all of these songs were created with AI, including the last one,

00:26which just became the first ever AI-generated song to hit number one on Billboard's country digital

00:33song sales chart. I know, I know, but that was the point. Most people can no longer tell the

00:40difference between a human-made song and one made by AI.

00:46Ipsos and music streaming app Deezer surveyed 9,000 people across eight countries playing one

00:52human song and one AI song. 97% of respondents got it wrong. So how hard is it really? Kato on the

01:01track is a number one Billboard charting music producer and says there's usually one big giveaway,

01:07but it's something trained ears pick up faster. AI-generated songs still to me

01:13have this very sanitized quality to it where like the singing is perfect. The production sounds like

01:22very clean and like very, uh, like the chord progressions are like so clean. So to test this

01:30out, I brought in the big guns, AKA my sister and music lover and Harry Kumar, co-founder and chief

01:37creative officer of the quantum technology company MOF. Oh, this is gonna be hard. In spring mornings,

01:45the sun rises on the horizon. I think that's AI. I'm inclined to say it's AI. It has like a weird

01:53like metallic sound, but it's also way too on beat for that style of song. What she's hearing,

02:02that too perfect feel is the same thing many producers listen for in music software. Everything

02:09sits on a grid like a musical spreadsheet. When you click notes with a mouse, they snap perfectly

02:15onto that grid. But when a real person plays a melody, even the best musicians are slightly off the

02:21grid, not off beat, just human. Those micro imperfections are what make music feel authentic

02:27while AI hits every note with mathematical precision. I think it's real. I think

02:42potentially the vocals were already sampled. My first instinct was it's not AI.

02:48Oh no, I should have went with what I thought. This second song is all over TikTok. It's now been

02:55deleted, but people have suspected it was AI for some time now. And those rumors grew when it vanished

03:02from Spotify. Back in September, Spotify announced new AI protections, including a ban on impersonation

03:09and AI cloning of artists' voices, unless the artist gives permission. A Spotify spokesperson confirmed the

03:15reason for the removal of I Run to Straight Arrow News, saying this song was removed for violating

03:21Spotify's impersonation policy. No royalties were paid out on the track's streams. To be fair,

03:27our contestants did pretty well overall. But what you saw here is exactly what's happening globally.

03:34AI tools like Suno, recently valued at nearly $2.5 billion, are evolving so quickly some songs

03:41sound indistinguishable from real humans. As I mentioned, Kumar is co-founder and CCO of Moth.

03:47A few months ago, Straight Arrow News reported on Moth's Breakthrough,

03:51the first song ever created using quantum AI music technology.

04:07We used some classical machine learning techniques and some quantum machine learning techniques to then

04:14produce this generative stream of music, where each time you listened to it, it was stylistically

04:20the same, but always different. Kumar isn't anti-AI. He says some generative AI is astonishing,

04:27some is a little scary, but a lot of AI companies are now hitting computational limits,

04:33pushing beyond what today's modern computers can handle. We're starting to see a lot of these

04:37companies choke on their own ambition. And that ripple effect hits the music industry too. Kato also

04:43isn't anti-AI. He actually likes using it as a collaborative tool, especially for new artists

04:50still building their sound. I think new artists and new songwriters especially, who are still kind of

04:57in that 10,000 hours phase, can use a platform like Suno, type in their lyrics, or feed it one of their

05:06beats that they made, and then just generate a ton of ideas that they can work off of. But legal

05:13questions get marky. Multiple lawsuits are being filed over who owns the rights to AI-created music.

05:19And they say that, okay, if you're on a pro subscription, you own the copyrights, right?

05:25But that's also like contingent on whether it can actually be enforced, because they know that

05:33they've trained their model off of the world's music. And on top of that, both Kato and Kumar

05:39agree that AI often lacks real human authenticity. The way that AI has been applied, and specifically the way

05:47that data has been stolen, the way that we are, you know, prompting, you know, prompting visuals

05:56without really much artistic practice involvement in that, I think is unsustainable and also is unlikely

06:03to in the long term really resonate with users, with consumers of content, of media.

06:08The Ipsos Deezer poll also found most listeners want clear labeling when a song is 100% AI.

06:15Half believe AI will play a major role in music creation within 10 years, but for the people

06:21who do this for a living, the concern isn't just technology, it's preserving the value of human craft.

06:27As a music producer of the last 15 years, I care deeply about this craft in this art form. And so

06:35when I see people who are able to kind of like play ball in our space now because of tools like AI

06:43and some of these other platforms, it makes me feel a certain type of way, you know, but at the same

06:49time, I'm never going to hate on someone that's trying to get their shine on.

06:53The future of music may be part human, part AI, or something in between soon. But as Harry Kumar put

07:01it, the future is coming, that's for sure. For more on this story and others,

07:05head over to san.com or download our mobile app. I'm Kennedy Felton with Straight Arrow News.

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