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

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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.

00:02I want you to guess which songs are produced by humans and which are produced by artificial

00:07intelligence.

00:08Well, I tricked you because all of these songs were created with AI, including the last one,

00:27which just became the first ever AI-generated song to hit number one on Billboard's country

00:33digital song sales chart.

00:34I know, I know, but that was the point.

00:38Most people can no longer tell the difference 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

00:52one human song and one AI song.

00:5497% of respondents got it wrong.

00:58So how hard is it really?

01:00Kato on the track is a number one Billboard charting music producer and says there's usually one

01:06big giveaway, but it's something trained ears pick up faster.

01:09AI-generated songs still, to me, have this very sanitized quality to it where the singing is

01:19perfect. The production sounds like very clean and like very, uh, like the chord progressions

01:27are like so clean.

01:29So to test this out, I brought in the big guns, AKA my sister and music lover and Harry

01:35Kumar, co-founder and chief creative officer of the quantum technology company Moth.

01:40Oh, this is going to be hard.

01:42In spring mornings, the sun rises on the horizon.

01:49I think that's AI.

01:50I'm inclined to say it's AI.

01:51It has like a weird, like metallic sound, but it's also way too on beat for that style

01:59of song.

02:00What she's hearing that too perfect feel is the same thing many producers listen for in

02:07music software. Everything sits on a grid, like a musical spreadsheet. When you click notes

02:13with a mouse, they snap perfectly onto that grid. But when a real person plays a melody,

02:18even the best musicians are slightly off the grid, not off beat, just human. Those micro

02:25imperfections are what make music feel authentic. While AI hits every note with math

02:30medical precision.

02:31I think it's real. I think potentially the vocals were already sampled.

02:44My first instinct was it's not AI.

02:48Oh no, I should have went with what I thought.

02:51This second song is all over TikTok. It's now been deleted, but people have suspected it

02:57was AI for some time now. And those rumors grew when it vanished from Spotify.

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

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

03:13A Spotify spokesperson confirmed the reason for the removal of I Run to Straight Arrow News,

03:18saying this song was removed for violating Spotify's impersonation policy.

03:23No royalties were paid out on the track streams. To be fair, our contestants did pretty well

03:29overall. But what you saw here is exactly what's happening globally. AI tools like Suno,

03:35recently valued at nearly $2.5 billion, are evolving so quickly, some songs sound indistinguishable

03:43from real humans. As I mentioned, Kumar is co-founder and CCO of Moth. A few months ago,

03:48Stray Arrow News reported on Moth's Breakthrough, the first song ever created using quantum AI music

03:55technology.

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

04:14then produce 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,

04:28some 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.

04:36We're starting to see a lot of these companies choke on their own ambition.

04:39And that ripple effect hits the music industry too. Cato also isn't anti-AI. He actually likes

04:46using it as a collaborative tool, especially for new artists still building their sound.

04:51I think new artists and new songwriters especially, who are still kind of in that 10,000 hours phase,

04:59can use a platform like Suno, type in their lyrics, or feed it one of their beats that they made,

05:07and then just like generate a ton of ideas that they can work off of, right?

05:12But legal questions get marky. Multiple lawsuits are being filed over who owns the rights to AI-created

05:19music.

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.

05:36And on top of that, both Cato and Kumar agree that AI often lacks real human authenticity.

05:43The way that AI has been applied, and specifically the way that data has been stolen, the way that we

05:51are, you know, prompting, you know, prompting visuals without really much artistic practice

05:58involvement in that, I think is unsustainable, and also is unlikely to, in the long term,

06:04really resonate with users, with consumers of content, of media.

06:09The Ipsos Deezer poll also found most listeners want clear labeling when a song is 100% AI.

06:16Half believe AI will play a major role in music creation within 10 years.

06:20But for the people who do this for a living, the concern isn't just technology, it's preserving

06:26the value of human craft.

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

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

06:42of tools like AI, and some of these other platforms, it makes me feel a certain type of

06:47way.

06:48You know, but at the same time, I'm never going to hate on someone that's trying to get their

06:53shine on.

06:53The future of music may be part human, part AI, or something in between soon.

06:59But as Harry Kumar put it,

07:01The future is coming, that's for sure.

07:04For more on this story and others, head over to san.com or download our mobile app.

07:09I'm Kennedy Felton with Straight Arrow News.

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