We were pretty sure that Fenix Flexin’s “Rubberz” was made using AI, but musician Medasin was confident that it was made using Treblo specifically. Now the company and a new detection tool seem to confirm it.
The company’s new detection tool says the song is ‘very likely Treblo.’
The company’s new detection tool says the song is ‘very likely Treblo.’
On Monday, the company announced the open-source Treblo AI Music Classifier, which detects when a song was generated using Treblo, though not other AI tools. According to a blog post, it has a false positive rate of less than 1 in 1,000. That’s not unimpeachable, but it’s notable that the company’s own Classifier determined that “Rubberz” was “very likely Treblo” with “high confidence,” adding more fuel to the PR nightmare for Fenix.
Treblo does seem to be relishing the attention a bit. “The classifier returns a very high probability score for Rubberz, indicating the released audio was generated almost entirely by our model. That would make it the first known AI-generated song to reach the Billboard Hot 100,” CEO Ryan Tremblay said in a statement to The Verge. He continued, “Someone appears to have used our model to find a sound that millions of people connected with and that’s exciting.”
Fenix has continued to deny that Rubberz was made using AI, and has posted clips of what he claims are the project files of the recording session. However, those low-quality videos have done little to dispel any allegations of the song being AI-generated. According to Stereogum, Medasin contended in a since-expired Instagram story that Fenix clearly just used an AI stem separator to fake the session.
Fenix did not immediately return a request for comment.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.