AI is everywhere now—even in places you might not expect. You might be listening to a new song on Spotify or YouTube, only to find out later that the track was “composed” entirely by bots (save for the initial human-generated prompt). Some may argue that AI music has its place, but if you’re like me, you want to turn your attention to art created by real people who have taken the time to master the craft and share it with the world. And while I believe AI music can never replace that, the fact is, these tunes are getting harder to identify. When we meet them in the forest.
To be fair, some companies are working on ways to recognize AI content on their platforms, esp Spotify, YouTubeAnd Apple Music. But while you may see an AI label here and there, there are still plenty of examples of AI-generated content that aren’t identified as such—in part, because most reporting is still based on an honor system. Lifehacker’s David Nield was frustrated by the experience When looking for music to listen to on YouTube, the only reliable solution is to do some research before committing to a particular channel. It now has a short list of options to choose from, sure, but it’s a lot of work to guarantee that your music selection is 100% human-made. It also makes it difficult for smaller creators, who may not have as much “proof” that they’re not using AI, if you’re so strict with your usage.
How to use Deezer’s new AI detector
Deezer, the French music streaming service, thinks it has a solution. Reported by MacRumorsThe platform now has a new tool that it says can identify AI-generated music with nearly 100% accuracy. The company says it receives more than 75,000 AI-generated songs every day, which is 44% of the total uploads on the platform. By looking for artifacts left behind by the AI, Deezer claims it can detect whether the tracks were made by humans or bots. In fact, it appears the tool is the same one Deezer uses to label AI tracks on its own platform.
Of course, this tool works with Deezer, so if you’re a user, you already have access. But the company says its AI detector works with up to 20 different streaming services. It includes the following:
What do you think so far?
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Spotify
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Apple Music
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YouTube
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YouTube Music
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recruitment
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Amazon Music
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Soundcloud
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Yandex Music
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Kobuz
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Bitport
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iTunes
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Napster
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Pandora
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Angami
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KKBOX
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Last.fm
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Soundmachine
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Boomplay
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Audiomech
To use the toolYou need to connect it to your preferred streaming service. It might rub privacy-minded users the wrong way because it requires you to give a third-party tool access to your streaming service, but if you’re okay with Deezer accessing your Apple Music or Spotify libraries, you can take advantage of the search software. Alternatively, you can manually connect Deezer’s detector to playlists if you have a link (but you can’t upload individual tracks). Once you connect Deezer to your platform, it imports your various playlists and detects any music it thinks was created using AI.
Deezer claims its tool is 99.8% accurate and misses two tracks out of every 1,000. However, there is no real way to verify those figures, so take them with a grain of salt. I also wish the detector was a bit more flexible. I’d love to not have to connect my entire streaming service to use it, and I’d like to have the option to check more than just individual playlists. I think an AI detector would be most useful on a case-by-case basis rather than questioning whether part of your playlist contains AI-generated tracks. Still, a tool like this could be a powerful ally in the battle to listen to human-created music—or, at the very least, know for sure that the song you’re enjoying was generated by AI.
