The French music platform Deezer has introduced a free web-based tool that scans your music playlists across different streaming services and tells you how much of that music is AI-generated.
The company says its detection tool uses the same technology it has relied on internally to identify and label hundreds of thousands of AI-generated music tracks. The tool works on playlists for about 20 music services, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, SoundCloud and Pandora. You can also direct the tool to a specific uploaded file or URL. It can scan up to 100 playlists at a time.
AI music is controversial. While it seems inevitable that more and more artists will use the technology, many listeners have an [adverse reaction] to the idea of music not created by humans. Meanwhile, music companies such as UMG are trying to protect their artists from AI fakes while also hedging their bets with deals that allow for AI remixes of their catalogs on platforms such as TikTok.
Elsewhere in the music industry, the Grammy Awards have decided (at least for now) that only human artists are eligible for the coveted award after one artist who uses AI, Ghostwriter, asked for award consideration in 2023. Billboard allows AI-generated music on its charts, but the music seller Bandcamp doesn't allow it in its service.
Deezer's AI-detection tool may give music fans a way to see whether AI-generated music has overtaken the tracks in their libraries. It works whether you have an existing Deezer account or not. And because nothing is ever truly free, the tool sucks your playlists into Deezer and offers to build them into a new account for you if you don't already have one.
How Deezer's tool fared in our (very limited) test #
In my limited test on the tool, a scan of my Spotify playlists found 0% AI content. That number was incorrect, since I've added several albums from the AI music cover-song creator and comedian Nick Harrison, known as "The Professor."
A Deezer representative suggested that some artists who aren't already on Deezer might not be detected.
"With our policy and approach to AI music (detecting, tagging and excluding from recommendations), we have seen that some AI music is just not uploaded to Deezer," the representative said in an email.
But Harrison's albums are on the platform, as the representative later confirmed. It's possible that because I had Harrison's music in my library as albums, not as individual tracks on my playlists, his AI music wasn't detected.
As a next step to ensure the tool works, I added some of Harrison's songs to my existing playlists. The representative also suggested adding a few known AI artists into playlists, such as Velvet Sundown. Doing that seemed to work; my AI-detection score went up from zero to a whopping 1%.
My take: Unless your playlists rely heavily on new music selected by recommendation algorithms rather than your own curation, you probably won't see many tracks flagged as AI-generated with Deezer's tool. However, as AI-generated music continues to grow and labeling struggles to keep up, this could still be a handy tool to bookmark in case you're unsure whether what you hear on a streaming service is real or AI-generated.
At least not yet.