By Terrence O’Brien
Publication Date: 2025-11-29 17:00:00
Streaming service Deezer recently conducted an experiment with the help of research firm Ipsos. The discovery that 97 percent of people can’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human-made music was alarming. But it’s not the whole story either.
The survey had 9,000 participants listen to three tracks and ask them to guess which, if any, were fully AI-generated. If the participant did not guess all three items correctly, they were placed in the no-error pile. That means if you answered two out of three correctly, Deezer and Ipsos still said you couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and the real thing.
Deezer sent me the three tracks used in the study and so I decided to conduct my own (less scientific) experiment. I had 10 people listen to the same tracks and gave them the same prompt. People had trouble figuring out which songs were completely AI. Only one person got all three correct. But if I hadn’t pooled the answers, the results would have been much lower…
