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

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

and which are produced by artificial intelligence. Well, I tricked you because all of these songs were created with AI, including the last one

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

I know, I know, but that was the point. Most people can no longer tell the difference between a human-made song and one made by AI

Ipsos and music streaming app Deezer surveyed 9,000 people across eight countries playing one human song and one AI song

97% of respondents got it wrong. So how hard is it really

Kato on the track is a number one Billboard charting music producer and says there's usually one big giveaway

but it's something trained ears pick up faster. AI-generated songs still, to me, have this very sanitized quality to it

where, like, the singing is perfect, The production sounds like very clean and like very like the chord progressions are like so clean

So to test this out, I brought in the big guns, a.k.a. my sister and music lover and Harry Kumar, co-founder and chief creative officer of the quantum technology company Moth

Oh, this is going to be hard. In spring mornings the sun rises on the horizon I think that AI I inclined to say it AI It has like a weird like metallic sound but it also way too onbeat for that style of song

What she's hearing, that too perfect feel, is the same thing many producers listen for

In music software, everything sits on a grid, like a musical spreadsheet

When you click notes with a mouse, they snap perfectly onto that grid

But when a real person plays a melody, even the best musicians are slightly off the grid

Not offbeat, just human. Those micro imperfections are what make music feel authentic, while AI hits every note with mathematical precision

I'm a closer, know that I'm a mess. Tangled up in wires, I can't catch my breath

I run, I run, I run. I think it's real. I think potentially the vocals were already sampled

My first instinct was it's not AI. No, no, I should have went with what I thought

This second song is all over TikTok. It's now been deleted, but people have suspected it was AI for some time now

And those rumors grew when it vanished from Spotify. Back in September, Spotify announced new AI protections

including a ban on impersonation and AI cloning of artists' voices, unless the artist gives permission

A Spotify spokesperson confirmed the reason for the removal of iRUN to Straight Arrow News

saying this song was removed for violating Spotify's impersonation policy. No royalties were paid out on the track's streams

To be fair our contestants did pretty well overall but what you saw here is exactly what happening globally AI tools like Suno recently valued at nearly two and a half billion dollars are evolving so quickly some songs sound indistinguishable from real humans

As I mentioned, Kumar is co-founder and CCO of Moth. A few months ago

Stray Arrow News reported on Moth's breakthrough, the first song ever created using quantum AI music technology

We used some classical machine learning techniques and some quantum machine learning techniques

to then produce this generative stream of music where each time you listen to it

it was stylistically the same, but always different. Kumar isn't anti-AI. He says some generative AI is astonishing. Some is a little scary

but a lot of AI companies are now hitting computational limits, pushing beyond what today's modern computers can handle

We're starting to see a lot of these companies choke on their own ambition. And that ripple effect hits the music industry too

Kato also isn't anti-AI. He actually likes using it as a collaborative tool

especially for new artists still building their sound. I think new artists and new songwriters especially

who are still kind of in that 10,000 hours phase can use a platform like Zuno, type in their lyrics

or like feed it one of their beats that they made, and then just like generate a ton of ideas that

they can work off of, right? But legal questions get marky. Multiple lawsuits are being filed over

who owns the rights to AI music And they say that okay if you on a pro subscription you own the copyrights right But that also like contingent on whether it can actually be enforced because they know that they trained their model off of

the world's music. And on top of that, both Kato and Kumar agree that AI often lacks

real human authenticity. The way that AI has been applied and specifically the way that

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

without really much artistic practice involvement in that, I think is unsustainable and also is

unlikely to in the long term really resonate with users, with consumers of content, of media

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

Half believe AI will play a major role in music creation within 10 years

but for the people who do this for a living, the concern isn't just technology

it's preserving the value of human craft. As a music producer of the last 15 years, I care deeply about this craft in this art form

And so when I see people who are able to kind of like play ball in our space now

because of tools like AI and some of these other platforms, it makes me feel a certain type of way

But at the same time, I'm never going to hate on someone that's trying to get their shine on

The future of music may be part human, part AI, or something in between soon

But as Harry Kumar put it, The future is coming, that's for sure

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

I'm Kennedy Felton with Straight Arrow News