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I was looking for videogame remixes one day and found a channel doing Little Nemo from the NES. I used to love that game and thought it was an odd pick for remixes, one you don't see too often so I clicked on it and ... it was incredibly underwhelming. I listened for a few minutes and something was kind of off but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It was AI of course.

I'm not much of a music person, I've been listening to it daily for my entire life but I don't know much about theory. Still, when it comes to remixes, you can usually tell why someone remixed a song. They like that particular song, or there's a motif that really struck them. They'll pick out certain sounds or elements and build on them, single them out and rearrange them. It's very intentional and you can tell.

AI-generated remixes lack this intentionality. It was like someone had twisted a dial that just said "complexity" and that was it. There were more intricate layers of beats and instrumentation on top, but it wasn't doing anything. I sat there and listened for 15 minutes and it was like I heard nothing. Nothing new stuck in my head, there was no riff or little melody that made go, "Aw fuck yeah! This is what it's about!"

That's how you can tell AI generated music.

Sadly, a lot of slower and minimalist genres have been decimated by it though. Vaporwave, chillcore, dungeonsynth. A lot of these had large bodies of work to train on and it's a lot harder to tell due to their subtler nature, but you'll usually notice the artist has a new hour-long upload every day. If you click through it at random, you'll begin to notice that while the tones shift, the overall pattern of the entire hour-long mix is still kind of the same?

It's bleak, man. Fuck that shit.

Okay okay. First off, fuck AI yeah. But if it's becoming this indistinguishable where you need to go looking for tells that it's AI I don't think it's fair to call it bad music, just how it got there is bad.

It's like listening to Kanye West. Graduation is amazing but fuck him.

I fell hard for Dysmn, who was suspiciously dropping new music every few days. I really liked the sound, and I haven't found anything that sounds like that since. 270+ videos in under 2 years. I realized it wasn't human after a month or two.

Soooo, if anybody knows a great jazzy EDM metal noise, let me know.

I don't listen to anything made after about 2010. I don't have these worries.

I have yet to hear an AI generated song that didn't have some obvious tells in the vocals. Like how you can hear autotune, but it's even worse than autotune. Crackly/crunchy, heavily distorted but only on certain words. Weird pronunciation or annunciation.

I don't know if people are still making sampled music, but this thought occurred to me the other day.

What if I prompted certain phrased, riffs, and hooks that never existed instead of making a complete song.

Then I made a song using samples in my work.

Is this a new song? AI? A mix? Seems plausible that someone is doing this now.

I pretty much only listen to live music anymore anyways, because everything else is so produced it might as well be AI.

The drummer sounds like he has to many arms.
And the guitarist and the keyboard players sound like they clearly have more than 5 fingers on each hand. 😋

This description of AI songs could be a lament about most pop music: formulaic, sweet, generic, produced in a studio to sound perfect, not human. Works on radio or Spotify, but not so much for a live audience.

Sure, that's hard to detect. AI reproduces what we've been exposed to for decades.

I've been trying to figure out if Stone Rebel is an AI band or not. They started in 2018 and have put out something like 77 albums since, but it's relatively simple instrumental. They have almost no information online except a claim that they're "based in France"

Honestly can't tell if they're a legit yet very private group, or if they were early adopters of procgen music

I'm in the camp of, "if it's good, why should I care?" However, I'm all for transparency! Passing off AI-generated music as human-generated is fraud. Be honest!

There's a LOT of grey areas though. If you're a vocalist and you're using an AI-generated background? How's that any different from pressing "play" on a sequencer or even an audio file (of some sequenced or drum track)?

If you're a lyricist, the actual music isn't as important as the lyrics. Does it matter if they used AI to generate the music or should every lyricist be forced to pay someone to make the music for them or master an instrument (or sequencer)?

What if you're trying to translate your music into a different language and use AI to translate it? Is that AI-generated music? You can give your whole damned song to AI and it'll convert to a different language in-place without having to re-record it. It even uses your singer's voice!

To me, it's incredible technology and it's enabling artists of all kinds to do cool things with their music. It seems rather paternalistic to suggest someone's creativity doesn't "count" if they didn't sweat or spend years practicing to create it.

I use Qobuz, but is Spotify the only service that shamelessly promotes ai music?