Humans can no longer distinguish AI-generated music from real music

It is almost impossible for a person to tell the difference between music created entirely by artificial intelligence (AI) and one of a similar genre composed by humans. This was revealed by a survey released Wednesday.

A survey of 9,000 found that, "97% couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-made music in a blind test with two AI songs and one real song."

The poll was conducted by Ipsos for French streaming platform Deezer.

This study was conducted online from Oct. 6-10 in eight countries: the United States, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Japan.

While 46% of respondents believe AI can guide them in discovering new music, they are more pessimistic about its use for composing music.

The study finds 51% of respondents believe that AI will lead to the emergence of "lower quality and more generic" songs, and almost two-thirds (64%) think this technique may lead to "a loss of creativity in music production," the study stresses.

These results "clearly show that people care about music and want to know if they’re listening to AI or human made tracks or not," said Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer, in a statement.

The French company is, for the moment, the only audio platform that systematically indicates titles generated entirely by AI, through a message to users.

In January, it detailed that one in ten tracks played on its website in a day was a track composed entirely by AI. Ten months later, that figure represents "34% of the total number of songs," or nearly 40,000 a day, according to the company.

Despite this increasing trend, these songs currently account for a very small share of listeners.