I've been working hard at this over at SubmitHub, developing a way to detect AI songs: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker

These days roughly 20% of the songs coming through our platform for promotion are AI-generated. Roughly 75% of them are honest and declare their AI usage - but another 25% try to hide it. Some of them are actually writing scripts to "clean" their audio so that it can bypass detection.

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fooker 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do not try to solve an unsolvable problem, you'll end up hurting real users quite a bit more than you might imagine. Imagine new enthusiastic users trying your platform getting hit with an AI label because of inevitable false positives.

'Detecting AI' is not a problem that has real solutions, the only avenue is something supply side like synthid. But that harms users too, by introducing further barriers for indie users.

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zaptrem 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I train music generation models. They are very trivial to detect. In fact, detecting them then training them to evade detection by the detection model is a big part of training them! But the detectors win instantly without some hardcore regularization. Simply turn that off and you've instantly got a perfect classifier.

This isn't like text classification, the signal many orders of magnitude higher bitrate and so many more corners need to be cut. It's likely going to be nearly impossible or at least not remotely worth it to generate an audio signal that is truly undetectable in the foreseeable future.

	▲	fooker 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		We are talking about entirely different things. You are right, the output of a model that generates music directly is, for now, easy to categorize as AI. What this big flux of AI generated music online isn't really that. It'a a tiny bit autogenerated stuff and a whole lot of automatically remixed stuff. The reason it can not be easily classified as AI is because quite a bit of human produced music is also that, and you'd just shut out real users.
	▲	MetaWhirledPeas 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> They are very trivial to detect. Today. Trying to detect AI is like extracting water from puddles in a lake that is quickly drying up. What is the point in the short term if it's impractical in the long term? It will catch some low-hanging fruit in the best case, and will find false positives in the worst.

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cleversomething 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is an aside, but thank you for doing this work! As a musician who plays real instruments and submits real songs to Submithub, it's nice to know that hard work is going into validation and prevention of scammers passing off AI as their own talent. Keep fighting the good fight.

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CharlesW 5 hours ago | parent [-]

"AI detectors" are fun like horoscopes are fun, until they flag your music as AI generated, and distribution channels blacklist you and your label sues you. On the bright side, you can sue the creator of the AI detector in return.

	▲	woolion 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've had my digital art flagged a few times for various reasons (automatic copyright infringement and NSFW filters) -- so this is nothing new (in particular the artwork blocked the upload for some artist songs). The only thing is to have a reasonable appeal process. In all cases we got an automated approval after appeal, but it can put an untimely delay. Honestly I hope that the AI filter would be much better in terms of false positive than the aforementioned one, if only because it should be easier via statistical methods.
	▲	input_sh 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The only reason you're saying that is because you haven't tried to build such a detector yourself. It's not like text where it's impossible to tell reliably if something's AI generated or not, from a technical perspective it's very trivial to detect anything coming straight out of a Suno/Udio prompt. Nobody open sourced their detection algorithm as that would just trigger a cat-and-mouse game between Suno/Udio and a detection platform (and Suno/Udio have way more VC money than you do), but plenty are being sold as a service and work very reliably.

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chasd00 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

do you have any idea on what percentage of musicians use AI to create the song and then also create the sheet music so they can play it themselves? That seems like a decent workflow, use AI to get the song right, and then record yourself playing it with you're own creative tweaks. That's kind of how I do AI assisted coding.

	▲	oasisbob 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There are some composers who use a workflow like this - Suno is a scratchpad which can be used to quickly trial ideas, clarify concepts with collaborators, etc. don't think it's common, either among composers, or Suno users at large
	▲	VanTheBrand 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I would guess it’s significantly below 1%
	▲	ori_b 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Sounds dystopian. If I was tasked with designing hell for musicians, I would be inspired.
	▲	QuercusMax 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I assume you're not a musician, because that sounds insane. If you're good enough to play at full speed from brand new sheet music, then you don't need the AI. Playing from sheet music isn't like typing.

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comprev 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm curious how your platform might avoid false positives with intentionally repetitive music, in particular techno (either produced via a DAW or hardware).

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grey-area 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you detect terrible music instead? In many ways that’s a more interesting problem and gets to the heart of why people dislike mediocre slop.