Whether you know it or not, you’ve likely seen an AI-generated… something today. An image, a video, or even a person.
But there’s also a good chance you’ve listened to AI, too.
One in two tracks uploaded to the French streaming service Deezer in June was AI-generated, the company told Metro.
This amounts to some 90,000 pieces of phoney music flooding the service every day, double compared to September.
The reason why there’s such an influx of fictional music is simple, Aurélien Hérault, chief innovation officer at Deezer, tells Metro.
‘Because it’s possible to do so,’ Hérault says, ‘it’s never been easier to create music, and with only a few words you can prompt a whole song.’
Can you tell which track is AI-generated and which isn’t?
Probably not.
When Deezer asked 9,000 people last year if they could identify a track made by AI versus one made by humans, AI fooled 97% of them.
Can you? Here are two tracks below. One was made by machine learning algorithms, statistical models and linguistic rules; the other by people.
Someday is a song made by the British-Sudanese neo-soul artist Elmiene, who is a human. While Say My Name With Respect was composed using Suno, an AI software trained using tens of millions of pop songs.
The artificial artist Xania Monet, crafted by the Mississippi poet Telisha Jone, signed a $3million deal with a major R&B record label in September.
How about another go? Though this round includes a certain AI soul singer whose monthly listen count rivals Ariana Grande.
The song Heart You Help Me Find, by the dusky-voiced jazz singer Sienna Rose, has been flagged by Deezer’s systems as containing AI elements.
Toronto R&B creator 3ee (pronounced ‘Bee’, by the way) is the flesh-and-bones artist behind PDA.
Deezer suggested one more AI artist to share with Metro.
Its album page on Deezer has a label reading: ‘AI-generated content. This album includes tracks detected as generated with the use of AI.’
Which one has that label, though?
This one was a bit of a trick. Of course, the track which lists the artist as ‘Beats By AI’ is, in fact, a beat made by AI (and an NSFW one in that).
Yet the vocals, instruments and lyrics for Dird Road I Stayed On were also produced by an algorithm.
The artist Breaking Rust, with some 1,800 fans, is a music project by composer Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor.
One of Breaking Rust/Taylor’s tunes, Walk My Walk, was the first AI‑generated single to top the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart.
AI music once just 10% of daily Deezer uploads
AI tools are being used in playlisting, demo recording and even making chart-topping music, so much so that Deezer made an AI music detector.
And these slop songs are nothing new – in 2023, the song Heart on My Sleeve’ went viral for its AI mimics of Drake and the Weeknd’s voices.
The TikTok user behind the track, ghostwriter, compared their use of AI writing tools and voice clones to just that – ghostwriting.
Tech enthusiasts at the time were proclaiming that AI has ‘forever changed’ the music industry, letting anyone make music that sounds like a living, breathing Homo sapiens made it, or close enough.
Deezer began tracking how much music being uploaded to it was AI in January 2025, when it was around 10,000 tracks, or 10% of daily uploads.
The number doubled by April that year before climbing to 30,000 in September and 50,000 in November.
In January 2026, some 60,000 silicon singers were belting out painful ballads, gospel music and upbeat pop (or ‘A pop’).
Yet artists – of the human variety – feel these synthetic songs threaten the very existence of musicians.
Why do people listen to AI music?
Do you listen to AI music?
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Yes
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Not at all
These homemade tracks aren’t always labelled as AI on music platforms, allowing fictional artists to sneak into playlists and recommendations.
Hérault says that the amount of streams – people actually listening – of AI tunes on Deezer is between 1-3%.
‘Up to 85% of these streams are fraudulent, meaning people are synthetically boosting the streams to steal money from the royalty pool and legitimate artists,’ she says.
Given that Deezer excludes AI-generated tracks from recommendations, Hérault suggests that the thousands listening to them could just be curious, or have heard them on social media.
‘We want to give our users the choice,’ Hérault adds, ‘and we’ve seen that people care about knowing if they listen to AI music or not.’
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