Photo Credit: Ali Hajian
A group of musicians is taking a stand against generative AI technology, and they’re on the hunt for AI “grifters” trying to pass off AI slop as human-made art.
How do you identify a song that’s been generated with AI and claims to be human-made? As audio-oriented generative tools have become increasingly sophisticated, the internet has become inundated with AI-generated music and other content. Some users of such platforms and tools openly acknowledge their use of AI, but others deny using the technology in the hopes of scooping up royalties and climbing the charts undetected.
Some musicians, including EDM producer Max Harris, known professionally as H4RRIS, are taking a stand against bad actors trying to pass off so-called AI slop as human-created art. Harris told The Verge that he views AI-generated music as “a kind of decoy art form” and that true art (in any medium) is “created by people that are trying to express feelings and messages,” which he says AI lacks.
“I don’t consider AI-generated material to be art, and I don’t think this technology is really advancing art in any meaningful way,” Harris said. “It’s a technological advancement that’s giving people a way to steal real art and pass it off as their own.”
According to Harris, being an artist means having the ability to make experimental but informed creative decisions using one’s studied understanding of a medium. Generative AI, he says, often eliminates a user’s need to think and understand how a given piece of art comes together with a traditional creative process. As an EDM artist, he says AI content is increasingly muddying listeners’ understanding of what human-made electronic music actually sounds like.
“You can usually hear a sharp hipping throughout the [AI-generated] track,” Harris explained. “I think that comes from the way these models often work by starting with a big white noise block and then making guesses about waveforms by referencing data taken from real songs.”
But it’s not just songs that may or may not have been created using AI. The practice reflects the growing culture of mistrust that has resulted from the increasing presence of AI content in online spaces.
“People are just straight up uploading original, copyrighted tracks of artists like Madonna and asking [AI] to remix them,” Harris said.
Suno in particular, Harris explains, has certain quirks that have helped him learn how to spot songs created with it, even as the platform has emerged as one of the major players responsible for the recent surge in AI-generated music.
“Something I’ve noticed with a lot of Suno-generated tracks is that a lot of the time, you’ll hear the vocals and other melodic elements will start stuttering at the same exact time,” he said. “These models still have a hard time fully separating different parts of the songs they’re trained on, and they treat these elements like one big instrument. As a music producer, all of these things come across like choices that a human just wouldn’t make with their compositions because it just doesn’t make sense.”
Similarly, Italian producer Nihil Young has watched several new EDM stars rise after posting music he believes was generated with AI tools. Young’s posts on social media about people using Suno inspired Harris to make videos calling them out in the first place.
“These songs are just the sound of Suno, which to me means that the people behind the songs are just straight up uploading original, copyrighted tracks of artists like Madonna and asking the platform to remix them,” said Young, referring to Josh Fawaz’s remix of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” which included AI credits after it was the subject of intense online scrutiny. “If they can do it with major artists like her, they can do it with you, me, and everyone else, which just isn’t cool. They can take your entire catalog, feed it to Suno, and generate ‘new’ songs from that stolen work.”
Young said that the increasing popularity of his posts on Threads calling out AI slop has led to multiple hacking attempts and lots of online harassment. Strangely, he also believes people bought fake followers to boost his Spotify numbers in order to cast doubt on the authenticity of his music.
“Music production is where most of my income comes from, and almost as soon as AI began rolling out, I started losing many of my clients,” Young explained. “I can only imagine what it’s been like for singers, graphics artists, and people working in other creative fields. Whether you realize it or not, this stuff is impacting everyone.”
Even with artists who openly use AI, and as platforms begin to more clearly label AI-generated songs, an increasingly number of listeners have said that they can’t tell the difference between human-made music and generative AI. AI music detection tools can certainly help, but those too require AI—and there’s still the potential to falsely identify such tracks. But Young says that better listening equipment can help make AI elements more apparent to users, at least those who care enough to listen.
“In my opinion, it becomes obvious that you’re listening to AI-generated music when you put on a good pair of headphones,” he said. “But I also think that a lot of people these days are consuming music like fast food and listening to it through the speakers on their phone. Or they just have it on as background noise, and they don’t necessarily care what it sounds like.”