How do you identify/avoid AI generated Music?
BotB Academy Bulletins
 
 
234052
Level 13 Chipist
Meleody
 
 
post #234052 :: 2026.03.04 1:09pm
  
  retrokid104, cabbage drop and nicole liēkd this
Of course the strict adherence to soundchip limitations makes chiptunes sort-of immune to AI Music generators for now, but I'm also talking about music in general.

I feel like the amount of AI generated Music has significantly increased recently. In the past I had no issue leaving a comment calling people out for it. I'm starting to doubt my ability in telling apart AI generated Music from real Music however. And I would be forever ashamed for calling a real song AI slop.

(there is also the area in-between: Music made partially by AI and partially by a Person. I don't want to discourage people getting into music, but them using AI will inevitably stop them from improving imo.)

As far as I can tell many music generators are still a form of diffusion, just in a series of auto-regressive blocks, and therefore have a high noise component / low transparency with instruments morphing into each other, sort of like early image generators blending details together. Apart from that there are certain structures similar to the weird sentence choices of Large Language Models. But I just can't identify either of those signs clearly enough anymore to write the songs off as slop.

 
 
234055
Level 21 Mixist
MattMoney
 
 
 
post #234055 :: 2026.03.04 1:21pm
  
  cabbage drop and Meleody liēkd this
Honestly, you've got all the hallmarks mentioned here already. Noisy vocals (and drums especially!), instruments blending together, stilted lyrics, and basic structure are pretty much all the hallmarks.

A few weeks ago I busted a dude in a random discord for an obviously AI generated song
. It was super funny too, the dude was doubling down in VC claiming to have written this while conceding that:
- He didn't remember any plugins used to make it
- This was his first and last song
- "The guitars were made with FL"
- His mic in vc sucked

I've found that context in light of the previous factors really is the biggest tell for fully AI-generated music. If it's out of nowhere from someone who wouldn't have any right making something that sounds like that, it's probably AI. Massive production or compositional "skills" out of nowhere, especially if it appears to be very studio-polished on first glance, an inability to answer basic questions about the compositional and mixing processes, etc. If you think someone's faking it, press them with questions only a legit songwriter could answer.
 
 
234058
Level 30 XHBist
Tex
 
 
 
post #234058 :: 2026.03.04 1:38pm
  
  Warlord, Prestune and Meleody liēkd this
I use BlockTube to block entire AI channels and haven't seen any in a while.

Any channels that are called like "Mario Citypop" and with a suspicious thumbnail.

Also, I don't care what it sounds like. I don't want to analyze what it sounds like. I wish people would focus more on discussing human-made things.
 
 
234060
Level 13 Chipist
Meleody
 
 
post #234060 :: 2026.03.04 1:48pm
I don't want to analyze what it sounds like either. I know that every bit of attention I give to AI is attention I should've given to a person instead.

The problem is that not every bad actor is so blatant when it comes to making AI content. I fear that If I ignore the issue for too long it just disappears because I can't tell Reality from AI generated stuff anymore.
 
 
234063
Level 31 Chipist
damifortune
 
 
 
post #234063 :: 2026.03.04 1:58pm :: edit 2026.03.04 2:04pm
  
  fortuna0800, Prestune, 9sphere, CouldntBeMe and Meleody liēkd this
I honestly feel like trying to identify what is or is not AI-generated is an uphill battle that can't really be won. it's hard not to make it a witch hunt. Tex and Matt are both right that if you're in a place where it could crop up, context matters a lot. if something seems suspiciously inhuman or devoid of humanlike context, then the best you can do is ignore it. the truth of the matter doesn't really come into play there. you had a gut feeling, you acted upon it, and there is no shortage of other stuff to think about trying next. but as tech grows and trends move forward there are always going to be new and different "tells", and old "tells" are going to fall out of favor.

I guess for me personally I don't go looking for music in any place that this would ever be a problem. my discoverability paths usually involve branching around from artists/bands related to artists I know; or labels or genres I'm reading about and exploring via sites like RYM, Wikipedia or Discogs. I've been doing it this way since long, long before the "AI" boom, so I don't claim that this is an intentional method of avoidance on my part. in terms of finding new music though I don't think AI-generated music affects me in the slightest. my methods are pretty human-centric.
 
 
234068
Level 20 Mixist
Luigi64
 
 
 
post #234068 :: 2026.03.04 2:47pm
  
  fortuna0800 liēkd this
for music it is extremely easy to prove to someone that you are not in fact slopping it up just by showing a project file. so you can just shoot them a message and if they are all hesitant and defensive and stuff then they're probably a big stinky liar. google has SynthID for watermarking their ai's outputs, we need HumanID. if you're drawing, take a timelapse! even just showing that you made SOMETHING with a pencil in the past is so much better than a whole gallery of perfectly-rendered art with no visible brushstrokes.
ok yeah that was kind of a tangent. this is about music. i just mean to say in my very awesome and cool personal opinion I think that it is okay to be a skeptic and if you are making art with your own two paws, you should make that apparent. no wait i meant to say breaking the pencil is 67 TUFF save the trees and be mango blud not diddy foid. epstein israel respect WE CAAAARRY THE FLAME
but yeah context is absolutely the best indicator here. i don't hate ai nearly as much as i hate big fat stinky poopoo liars sorry if i sound like a paranoid schizophrenic
 
 
234072
Level 21 Chipist
SweatyNoodle
 
 
 
post #234072 :: 2026.03.04 3:19pm
simple: dont listen to music
 
 
234076
Level 24 Chipist
MelonadeM
 
 
 
post #234076 :: 2026.03.04 4:37pm
The thing to not use is any solution that claims to "identify" AI material, chances are these are also powered by AI and will most likely produce a wrong result, leading you to be misled.

A lot of what is mentioned in this thread is true, however, but there's one very key tell-tale sign for me: Upload frequency.

A real artist would upload, at most, a set of songs at once all belonging to one album. However the time between these could be months, or for single songs could be days or weeks. They would most likely also be on differing subject matters, and not the same subject, right?

AI music channels, especially those "cover/remix" channels, they'll upload dozens of remixes in a day, then upload another dozen the next day. These aren't even ran by humans, but rather by content farms. It is simply just a new wave of "Pregnant Spider-Man and Elsa" I think.

As for songs themselves, keep an ear open, you'll hear some... weird choices, like scratchy or grainy sounding vocals, not intentionally but as a result of some artifact, instruments morphing like was mentioned in the thread earlier, and particularly for remixes, completely changing the direction like a minute in. It's also typically going to try sounding incredibly well produced, with "top-tier vocals", "punchy big drums", and so on so forth.

Others in the thread are right, though, the tells that exist now may just not exist in the future, and some even mitigated now by smarter actors. The thing is, smarter actors typically don't really engage with this stuff, I feel. And, I'd probably argue that tells may become easier in the future, as AI algorithms feeding themselves with AI-generated content will slowly poison them.

But maybe all of this isn't even needed.

The biggest thing you can do is surround yourself with known human artists - people on this site offer as great examples, and who they follow as well more than likely too. We're also not shy from providing imperfect art, as we ourselves are not perfect. Unless any of us suddenly decide to be AI evangelists, it's unlikely, no, nigh impossible you'll see AI generated anything from us either here on BotB or like, on any of the social media websites that we're on.
 
 

LOGIN or REGISTER to add your own comments!