This post is part of Lifehacker's "Exposing AI" series. We explore six different types of AI-generated media and highlight the common quirks, byproducts, and characteristics that will help you tell the difference between artificial and human-generated content.
The AI Effect: A New Era in Music and Its Unintended Consequences
Of all the AI-generated content, AI music is perhaps the strangest. It doesn’t feel like it should be possible to ask a computer to produce an entire song from scratch, like asking ChatGPT to write you an essay, but it is: apps like Suno can generate a song for you based on a simple prompt, complete with vocals, instruments, melodies, and rhythms, some of which are far too convincing. The better this technology gets, the harder it will be to recognize AI music when you stumble across it.
Actually, it’s already pretty tricky. Sure, there are obvious examples (no matter how good they are, no one thinks Plankton actually sings any of those covers), but there are plenty of AI-generated songs guaranteed to fool the average listener. Instrumental electronic music that already sounds digital is particularly hard to distinguish and raises a lot of ethical questions, as well as concerns about the future of the music industry.
But let’s put that aside for a moment and focus on the task at hand: recognizing AI music when you hear it in the wild.
