AI Is Coming for Music, Too

You’ve already seen how “diffusion” AI models have made it simple to generate illustrations, lifelike photos, and even videos. What that technology means for music is nearing an inflection point—and so is our understanding of what “creativity” really is. For MIT Tech Review, James O’Donnell unpacks the debate, and blind-tests colleagues and experts to see if they can identify AI-generated music. He also manages to make me (and surely other music fans) very, very uncomfortable.

I decided to pick 12 genres, generate a song sample for each, and then find similar songs made by people. I built a quiz to see if people in our newsroom could spot which songs were made by AI. 

The average score was 46%. And for a few genres, especially instrumental ones, listeners were wrong more often than not. When I watched people do the test in front of me, I noticed that the qualities they confidently flagged as a sign of composition by AI—a fake-sounding instrument, a weird lyric—rarely proved them right. Predictably, people did worse in genres they were less familiar with; some did okay on country or soul, but many stood no chance against jazz, classical piano, or pop. Beaty, the creativity researcher, scored 66%, while Brandt, the composer, finished at 50% (though he answered correctly on the orchestral and piano sonata tests).