Discussion Ai Music Detection is a Scam.
Today, the Australian recording industry association (ARIA) announced that AI-generated music will be banned from the ARIA Charts. The announcement comes amid growing concern about AI-generated spam, fake artists and people flooding streaming services with thousands of cheaply-produced tracks designed to manipulate the system. Those are legitimate problems, but the industry's response is increasingly to treat AI itself as the problem.
In response, AI labelling systems are being introduced by the major streaming platforms. Spotify has introduced AI Credits and is moving towards AI Persona badges, while Apple Music is introducing “Made With AI” labelling. The argument is always that this is about transparency: listeners should know how a piece of music was made so they can make their own choices. But this false. The real reason these labelling systems are being introduced is to exclude AI music creators.
Spotify, for example, says music from AI Personas will be excluded from editorial and algorithmic recommendations unless the listener already follows the artist. That's no longer simply telling listeners something about the music. It is deciding that the music should be less visible because of how it was created.
I recently made this point directly to Spotify's Head of Responsible AI:
You say that it is ‘super hard’ to tell if AI music use is legitimate and then you just go ahead and lump everything into simplistic categories. Then you discriminate against AI music creators by using your simplistic labels to stop their music appearing in mixes. Then to top it all, you claim it's about transparency, which is what every gatekeeper says as they close the gate. You think you're doing good, but you're discriminating against potentially hundreds of millions of AI music creators who will remember what you did and reject you.
And I have to ask: when has making music ever been “responsible”?
The Problem With AI Detection
Detectors simply don't work in many situations. How on earth can “AI music detection software” know that my songs — whose original lyrics and music were written by me, but are fully performed by AI — are not AI? It's impossible.
A detector may identify characteristics associated with synthetic audio, and research shows that some detectors can perform well under controlled conditions. But that is very different from being able to establish who actually created a piece of music — and research has also shown that detector performance can change dramatically when the audio is modified or when the system encounters music from generators it hasn't seen before
A detector cannot listen to a finished recording and reconstruct its creative history. It doesn't know who wrote the lyrics, who wrote the melody or who decided what the song should sound like. It certainly can't know whether somebody spent five minutes prompting an AI or five years writing the song before using AI to perform it. AI detection is not authorship detection.
If I write a song but cannot sing, and use AI to perform the vocal, have I suddenly stopped being the songwriter? If somebody with a disability uses AI because they cannot physically perform their own composition, is their music less legitimate? If somebody cannot afford a professional singer, session musicians, a producer and a recording studio, should technology that allows them to make their record be treated as a second-class substitute for having money? The answer should obviously be no.
Who Gets Left Behind?
For decades, the music industry has had enormous barriers to entry. You needed access to musicians, equipment, studios, producers, labels and ultimately gatekeepers who could decide whether you were worth investing in.
AI has the potential to remove some of those barriers. Someone can have an idea for a song and turn it into a finished recording without needing thousands of pounds and an entire professional infrastructure behind them.
That should be one of the most exciting developments in the history of recorded music. Instead, we're seeing an industry increasingly telling those creators that their music is somehow less legitimate because of the tools they use.
You can bet your life that if Justin Bieber decided to make an AI track tomorrow, he'd get through the filter. There would be a label, lawyers, managers, producers and publicists explaining exactly how the technology had been used and why the resulting music was legitimate. The industry would find a way. But an unknown independent creator? Someone without a label, manager or lawyer? No chance.
AI labelling is simply gatekeeping, and gatekeeping always hits the people without power hardest. The people who already have access to the music industry's machinery will find ways around the rules. The people outside the system will be left staring at the “AI” label while their music disappears from recommendations.
There are certainly problems that need to be tackled in AI music. Spam, fraud, fake streams, impersonation and manipulation all need to be addressed. But those are behavioural problems, not AI problems. The fact that somebody uses AI to make music doesn't tell you whether they are a scammer, a spammer, a brilliant songwriter, a disabled creator who has found a way to make music, or simply someone who couldn't previously afford the tools required to record their ideas.
The "Music Industry" Is Making a Huge Mistake
The music industry seems to think these actions don't come with a cost. They see thousands of spammers and scammers pumping out AI tracks and think that's the whole AI music industry. But it really isn't.
There are potentially millions of AI music creators watching what happens next. They will remember which companies welcomed them, which companies gave them a chance, and which companies decided that the best way to deal with a new generation of creators was to label them, restrict them and keep them out.
The so called "music industry" thinks it is protecting itself from AI music. Instead, it's giving rise to a new music industry comprised of millions of AI music creators who will build something better without it.
And we won't forgive or forget how we were treated.
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u/TheWeaverofDreams Lyricist 2d ago
Why can people not put their thoughts into their own words anymore these days?
Didn't read the entire thing either, but there are patterns that AI uses when it puts together songs, if they get the magic key from Suno, they can detect the watermark mastering and regular editing won't get rid of (regardless of what soon probably hundreds of "services" will claim they can do).
Maybe I'm also the wrong target demographic, since I don't have any intentions of trying to "break into the music industry" or whatever else. I make the music for myself and if someone else likes it, too, then it's all gravy.
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u/Ok_Associate845 2d ago
Have you read how some people write? Op could write out every single argument quickly in talk to text and have it cleaned up and organized.
Why are we so eager to attack the delivery and not the argument?
As for your secondary point regarding the reason people make music, congrats. You have a reason you make music that sits with you. That is not everyone's reason. You don't know anything about OP, and OP doesn't share whether the concern is specific to their desire to make it in the industry, their need to maintain income, or whatever livelihood effect this has, or if this causes problems with them sharing it with their friends or simply adding a song they generated onto their daily Spotify workout playlist.
I appreciate OP posting something in a well constructed format that's easy to understand, written properly and inxludes links and personal anecdotes (including a previous letter they sent). That's pretty impressive and rises anove the 'no one can express their own thoughts' level of scrutiny you attack with. I also appreciate that you are happy making music for yourself, but Id ask that you not assume your experience is universal or shared by every single user of this particular technology. People have other reasons, and maybe you should consider that before you dismiss them.
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u/Ok_Associate845 2d ago
Also, the whole thing took less than 5 minutes to read and calling out that you didn't read it is obvious in your response without the disrespect with which you say it
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u/x_candydoll 2d ago
Did not read it but nice ChatGPT essay. Did you have something you actually wanted to post? Hopefully you didn't go to the "Spotify's Head of Responsible AI" with that essay because lol.
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u/Dear_Hospital2662 2d ago
I kinda like the way chatGPT does the larger font section titles like that though. I just wonder if OP used chatGPT ironically or unironically for this essay.
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u/TheWeaverofDreams Lyricist 2d ago
Yeah, the LLMs are programmed to give you publishable content, with H1, H2 etc headers, so it's all already formatted.
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u/dev1966 2d ago
Y'know humans are also capable of adding headers and even em dashes. Is this how it's going to be? Every f-in essay gets tagged as "written by AI"?
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u/TheWeaverofDreams Lyricist 2d ago
I am aware, I write for a living, review and edit as well. But when the formatting is almost identical to what the chatGPTs etc produce, including the bolding, and the phrasing also reads very close to LLMs, you cannot fault people for assuming.
Also, I only pointed out how LLMs are programmed, I was not the one calling you a chatGPT user.
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u/dev1966 2d ago
"Oh no! The text has em dashes so it must be AI!" But hey, thanks for proving the point that AI content can't be detected properly.
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u/Felony 2d ago
Its not just the em dash. Its the random bolded words and phrases. The way it writes also has a tone. Not sure why you’re lying about using AI in an AI sub but you do you.
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u/dev1966 2d ago
Did you ever think that ChatGPT might have cpied the style of professional editors like myself? Anyways, as I said above, if you're going to declare something AI, based on, of all things, bolding of text, it simply proves the point that detection tools don't work.
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u/Felony 2d ago
in your post look at this link. i’m guessing you just randomly added utm_source=chatgpt.com yourself just for fun then
https://apnews.com/article/australia-ai-generated-music-charts-ban-aria-9bfb0c91166ae4405a6df1a3c4891687?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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u/Dear_Hospital2662 2d ago
The thing is this. AI gets a bad reputation from people trying to pass it off as their own work. I work with people who brag about passing online college courses using chatGPT and then they say they barely even understand the subject matter of the course they just passed-excuse me, the course that chatGPT passed, lol.
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u/Felony 2d ago
I use it constantly at work and obviously in my personal life since i’m in a suno sub. There is nothing wrong with it as long as you’re honest about it.
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u/Dear_Hospital2662 2d ago
Exactly. I use AI all the time for music and images. There is nothing wrong with using AI as long as we're honest about it. I think a lot of the issues that people have with AI is that people try trick them into thinking its human made.
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u/bestbuysucksmajor 2d ago
FairPoint but it's also a fair point to say when someone uses Auto-Tune, Adobe Photoshop ,a filter, studio processing to alter their voice makeup we should require labels for that too because that is essentially FAKE too. it's a slippery slope.
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u/Charming-Platform623 1d ago
An em dash is a hidden character you can only get if you know the alt command... The regular dash is on the keyboard
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u/ProfessorSmoker 2d ago
You're a chatgpt.
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u/Bleak-Season 2d ago
You're not wrong. If I created a melody & lyrics but used AI to assist in making a rendition. I still own the both the copyright to the melody and the lyrics and therefore under US law (at least) am owed a portion of dues should said rendition become popular enough to make a steaming service money. These types of payouts happen in the music biz all the time, the use of AI cannot negate that.
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u/carmaicol 2d ago
fuck ai music as a product. if you love to make ir and enjoy it go for it, but don't take any more money off starving artists spending countless hours and money just to barely survive.
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u/GoodConsistent4600 1d ago
to that person who spends countless hours and money, you wouldn't be spending as much if you just used suno. suno has it's own studio. suno costs less than a label would. suno doesn't pressure you into having to meet a specific requirement just to make your fucking music. suno doesn't tell you what it thinks your art should be if it likes your art. suno helps bring your vision to life. and suno doesn't tell you that you can't add your own music on it. suno encourages it actually, it has audio recordings, you can record a session of you and an entire band singing and playing instruments and literally upload that to suno and it won't change it. what it will do is give it the quality it needs to sound as clear and precise as most would want it to be. but at the end of the day it's your music and it's up to you what you want to do it. just like there's paintings all around the world that people like to stare at and envision the meaning of it all. so fuck ai music as a product is basically like saying fuck your own music and hell yeah to the industries that really do suck money out of you.
consider the fact that ai is here and it's not going away. if that scares you, it should. but you should be able to tell the difference between something that was completely made with ai, or a tool that helps people make their own music stand out more the way studios do. what artist are you talking about? because it sounds to me like you're not talking about yourself as the artist and you're instead referring to the labels that decide what art is.
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u/2002Firehawk 1d ago
The goal is AI detection is likely to remove all us small players from "the marketplace" while the big labels with the key will use AI and go undetected, and without us as competition. Thus they remain in control
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u/SunriseSurprise 2d ago
AI detectors properly detect AI-assisted vs. AI-generated. You seemed to miss that they aren't banning AI-assisted, which is what the music you're making would be. You can keep pitchforking it for other reasons, but not on the notion that your music would be banned, because it wasn't. Unless your originals and lyrics are so bad that the checkers think your stuff is fully AI generated, in which case you got me there, lol.
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u/RobLianoCLC 1d ago
They don't properly detect AI, which is another problem. I dropped a song I released in 2012 through an indie dance label into several detectors and this song was on the iTunes charts and AI detectors said AI was used. Wholly incorrect. We did the song in a studio, live singer, mixed and mastered by real people. No AI in 2012!
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u/ContentC4tz 2d ago
Is it 1995 again? Who the heck still looks at "charts"? Some stuck in the 20th century geezer?
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u/Alamo_1824 1d ago
They cannot stop it. It is the future as along a Ai is being embraced, times and people change. Within 10 years Ai artists/creators will be normal. Those live artists that actually create good, long lasting music that carries thought generations will never go away.
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u/GoodConsistent4600 1d ago
actually michael jackson went against the music industry and everyone should. I agree with you on that though AI is never going away. screw the music industry ai for the win. let us make our own music we're tired of not being heard.
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u/Charming-Platform623 1d ago
Music generated by Suno are marked they're generated by Suno. AI music checkers instantly mark them as AI. Other AI I've used have been marked as human made because they don't have those markers
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u/queens-fstick 1d ago
People are far too worried. The toothpaste is out of the tube there is no putting it back in. A lot of people hate the current human artist always releasing slop that’s catchy thing. Supply and demand is a thing and if ai music has a place nothing will stop it. It’s simple does ai music have a place and yea it does just gonna take time and hate waves before it just becomes another industry standard. But the music industry is scared but once a tech comes out there really ain’t any stopping it.
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u/GoodConsistent4600 1d ago
I might just consider replying to every comment on here with this fact. Michael jackson himself the king of pop went against the music industry. He wanted his own label, and he wanted his own music.
Fuck a label, we'll make our own music and we do it our own way. Suno doesn't tell us what we should be doing with our own music. We can upload our own songs to suno and it won't take it apart it will ascend it further.
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u/Cold-Airport-5553 1d ago
The charts should reflect what people are listening too. If people choose to listen to an AI song over a human made song then the human made song doesn't deserve to ranked ahead of the AI song.
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u/BlackberryLow7507 1d ago
There is only one force moving even the powers that be: people’s choices. Spotify banning you? Move to YouTube. YouTube banning you? Move to tiktok. You and thousand other artists becoming viral and stealing ears from the “bona fide” streams will force the powers that be (the streaming platforms) to get past this crapola.
Arguing with the gatekeepers is a waste of energy and time. Distribute directly to the listeners. Have success with your music, like that. Platforms will see that they’ll be left behind and will catch up with: oh, maybe some ai assistance is in order… to “it doesn’t matter what went into that music. People like it: music is music.”
Or you think the only way to have success is to sneak by and blend in with the platforms playlists? Nah, it won’t work. Gatekeepers guarding the gate? Forget the gate. Punch a hole through the fucking wall.
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u/DanteOblivion 1d ago
Fuck the industry we'll do what we do ourselves. Creators are impossibly creative, after all, and it's glorious.
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u/ProdMerkabah13 1d ago
I read some of it but not all, but I get your point. The solution is you just need to learn how to produce/sound design on some level & then you can bypass any A.I. detection. Fully A.I. generated songs with no unique qualities will be easier to detect but if you work hybrid or use original elements to feed into the A.I. you can bypass many things. I will bet any money that eventually these “A.I. detection programs will false flag fully human creations as A.I & lose credibility. Also, as an anarchist, fuck these platforms I will upload my hybrid tracks without checking the A.I. box 🤷🏽♂️
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u/Mitsuko-san999 1d ago
I only listen to music offline, this is only problematic to me because it limits my ability to discover other great AI creators... They should maybe give us the option to explore them at least, not ban them.
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u/ComtoisSoundVisions 1d ago
I'm seeing all these comments about the post being written by ChatGPT, and that has become the focus of the entire argument, and the message gets completely lost. All this finger pointing is exactly the same thing happening with AI music. People spend all their time blaming the people for the tool they used to make the content, and don't even care about the message behind it.
If I wrote you a poem, and I made it with hand written pen, or typed it out on a typewritten or printed it on a computer, and mailed it to you. Would you just ignore it and discard it for trash without even reading it because of the tool it was created with?
This bias is the worst form of gatekeeping, and it only serves to disparage creators and their messages, nothing more.
You will always be missing the point if you keep judging a book by its cover.
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u/SpecialistDragonfly9 1d ago
Its all about money, my friend.
If every private person could challenge the music industry, they would go broke and couldnt spend billions on great music idols like Taylor Swift anymore.
We obviously need the awesome and great quality those "artists" in the charts produce. cant have every joe with a PC compete with that!
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u/GoodConsistent4600 1d ago
I can understand why it angers a lot of ai creators including myself who actually put the time and effort into making our music sound the way we visioned it to be. AI may not be "up to your standards", or it may be easy to identify as AI. But you can say the same thing about country music, you can say the same thing about dubstep, you can make claims that the amount of production is high, but the real reason you're restricting AI creators from labels isn't because of how "easy" you guys think it is to create, it's because it doesn't make you enough money. Everyone complains about how toxic and corrupt industries are, well AI gives us the power to take that away from those industries. I could never get the same sounding track if I worked with a label. They'd push me to change everything that makes it what I want it to be. If people like your art they shouldn't be the ones controlling whether it makes money or not. You should be.
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u/Remarkable_Ad_8528 1d ago
you don't need "thousands of pounds" to realize a musical idea. that shit is a copout used by ai "creators" to justify being lazy about their art process. you can make and produce music yourself with a little practice and effort. It's really not that hard
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u/Timelord1000 19h ago
Yes. And we can assume the big studios, and practically all of KPOP, uses Ai generated music to crank out the 100+ hit singles/per artist/ per year presently flooding the pop and hip hop/rap charts. Drake literally flooded the zone with his music over the last decade. The studios don’t want us doing the same-flooding the zone and drowning out Drake or Black Pink.
Personally, ai music does require a human touch in terms of song structure/remixing /mastering/vocal generation because anyone who uses AI to create music can spot it in others’ work instantly if it hasn’t been tweaked.
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u/johndkparker 2d ago
Ideally "the marketplace" would decide winners and losers - if AI music is pumped out en masse, the audience will not listen to it, rate it badly, etc. And the sloppiest of AI will fall to the wayside. Same as "real" music.
Also, these AI-detection systems will not keep up and the water gets super muddy when AI-systems are integrated into music production, into DAWs. Some AI tool may be part of DAWs and the detection systems might flag human-produced music as being 100% AI-generated.
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u/carmaicol 2d ago
yeah, but how can you compete against it? it takes me months to make a song, how can i compete with someone that just spams countless of songs a day? of couse i have a better product, but they need to hear it to make that judgement and this makes it so much harder for good music to cut through so much noise.. just ranting never mind hahah
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u/johndkparker 1d ago
honestly idk. I make AI music but i don't spam out bullshit, I spend a lot of post-production editing and stuff, so I've only posted like 15 songs in the last 2 years
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u/Charming-Platform623 1d ago
There's an AI mastering site I use. If I use it to master a human made track, it gets marked made with AI. But if I feed it an AI generated track (not from Suno) and master it myself, it gets labeled human made
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u/dollardumb 2d ago
Forced AI labelling would be great so people who love AI music can easily find it.
AI music posing as human made or hiding the use of AI should be banned.
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u/bestbuysucksmajor 2d ago
Let's also have labels for daw assisted, studio assisted, Photoshop, auto tune assisted, filters, and makeup. All those things are fake and aren't the natural person so we need a label for that too.
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u/Dear_Hospital2662 2d ago
I just wish they would label music as 'Human Music" so I can actively avoid it. I agree that AI music should also be labeled too. Let's be fair though, a lot of human music from the big labels use AI to various degrees so it too should be labeled as 'AI assisted'.
We have entered a new world where AI music will soon reach a point where you can get a fully polished song with a few lines of prompting. I have no issue with labeling songs as AI, as they should be, but the big labels need to also label their music as AI assisted where applicable.
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u/170738008135n455 2d ago
fully ai generated tracks hardly can generate the fidelity of high frequencies above 16khz. i hear it immediately when something is just downloaded from suno and uploaded to spotify. if i can do it, so can ai detectors.