AI is everywhere right now—even in places you don’t expect. You might be jamming to a new song on Spotify or YouTube, only to later learn that the track was “composed” entirely by bots (save for an initial human-generated prompt). Some might argue that AI music has its place, but if you’re like me, you want to devote your attention to art created by real people, who have taken the time to hone a craft and share it with the world. And while I believe AI music can never replace that, the fact is, it’s getting more difficult to identify these tunes when we come across them in the wild.
To be fair, some companies have been working on ways to identify AI content on their platforms, notably Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music. But while you might come across 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 much of the reporting is still based on the honor system. Lifehacker’s David Nield was frustrated by that experience when looking for music to listen to on YouTube, and found the only reliable solution was to do some research before committing to any particular channel. He now has a shortlist of options to choose from, sure, but it’s a lot of work to guarantee your music selection is 100% human-made. It also makes it harder for small creators, who might not have as much “proof” that they aren’t using AI, if you’re this strict with your consumption.
How to use Deezer’s new AI detector
Deezer, a French music streaming service, thinks it has a solution. As reported by MacRumors, the platform now has a new tool it says can identify AI-generated music with nearly 100% accuracy. The company says that it receives over 75,000 AI-generated songs every day, which amounts to 44% of the total uploads to the platform. By looking for artifacts left behind by AI, Deezer claims it can spot whether the track was made by humans or bots. In fact, it seems that the tool is the same Deezer uses to label AI tracks on its own platform.
Of course, this tool works with Deezer itself, so if you’re a user, you already have access. But the company says its AI detector works with as many as 20 different streaming services. That includes the following:
What do you think so far?
-
Spotify
-
Apple Music
-
YouTube
-
YouTube Music
-
Tidal
-
Amazon Music
-
Soundcloud
-
Yandex Music
-
Qobuz
-
Beatport
-
iTunes
-
Napster
-
Pandora
-
Anghami
-
KKBOX
-
Last.fm
-
Soundmachine
-
Boomplay
-
Audiomack
In order to use the tool, you need to connect it to your streaming service of choice. That might rub privacy-minded users the wrong way since you need 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 detection software. Alternatively, you can manually connect Deezer’s detector to playlists if you have the link (but you can’t upload individual tracks). Once you connect Deezer to your platform, it imports your various playlists and looks for any music it thinks was made using AI.
Deezer claims its tool is 99.8% accurate and misses two out of every 1,000 tracks. There’s no real way to test those stats, however, so take them with a grain of salt. I also wish the detector was a bit more flexible. I’d love not to have to connect my entire streaming service to use it, and I would like to have the option to test more than just individual playlists. I think an AI detector would be most useful on a case-by-case basis, rather than when questioning whether part of your playlist contains AI-generated tracks. Still, a tool like this may be a powerful ally in the battle to listen to human-made music—or, at the very least, know for certain that the song you’re enjoying was generated with AI.
