MARCH 1 — It’s all Spotify’s fault. Each time you create or listen to a playlist there’s this option of allowing the app to play hits from outside the list.
Before I knew it, AI-generated songs had taken over my playlist — literally before I knew it.
I was enjoying my regular evening walk with my earphones and Spotify blasting into my head. Two songs by a certain artist, Room, came on. I liked them, didn’t think much of it, added them to the playlist and moved on.
A few days later, an absolutely soul-groover, Midnight By The Shore, by Harusoupe (I swear I thought it was some Korean or Japanese band at first) stopped me flat while on the LRT.
What an awesome guitar and bass line, very hip, so smooth I couldn’t help but sway in the train-car.
I went to Harusoupe’s page in Spotify, skimmed through some of the music, found another fantastic song Almost Told You Tonight which I’ve since listened to a million times.
But one thing left me curious and after checking with Grok I realise this is the first red (or should it be green?) flag that a certain band/artiste and their songs are AI-generated: There’s next to nothing in the “About This Artist” section.
My suspicions were more or less confirmed when I ran Room and Harusoupe through Grok and asked AI itself if those two were AI musicians.
The answer was Yes, very likely. Why? Because there is no clear real-world presence or human identity and many folks on forums like Reddit and even YouTube were convinced the music was AI generated.
Grok’s reasoning (that selected bands or singers are AI) itself reflects an interesting irony in that it’s hard to be 100 per cent certain that a piece of music is AI-generated.
Somehow AI musicians rarely explicitly declare themselves. As if keeping people guessing is part of “machine consciousness”?
When I found out these four songs were (quite likely) AI made, I confess some ambivalence hit me.
Are my musical tastes so low and cheap that I can be duped and impressed by music sliced and pieced together by a bunch of pattern-recognition and data-organising programs?
Are we humans so easily drawn in by lyrics ‘written’ by a software which has fed on millions of songs, by a “voice” conjured up by an impersonal voice-mimicking app?
Sure, AI-generated music has been around since the mid-50s but the advent of ChatGPT and the like have super-charged their quality and popularity.
As with education, writing, video (cue Seedance and those Jackie Chan vs Thanos videos!) and a lot more sectors, music’s realm will soon be AI-overshadowed (if not AI-dominated).
Consider that Deezer reports more than 60,000 fully AI-generated tracks are uploaded daily and tagged 13.4 million AI tracks over 2025.
Spotify has removed over 75 million “spammy” tracks (many AI-related, like short clips for royalty farming or impersonations) in the 12 months leading up to September 2025
AI music generation tools like Suno generate north of 7 million songs daily, equivalent to Spotify’s entire catalogue every two weeks (!).
And there I was being tripped up by only four songs. Soon, not unlike the case with phone calls from unknown numbers and a lot of online news, our first thought will be: Is this stuff real?
I guess, just as in the other areas, a few fundamental questions spring to mind: How important is it for music to be created by a human? What is “real” music anyway?
What about individuals mixing electric with humanly created music? Something like a grandmaster playing chess with a computer? Centaur artists anyone?
In the meantime, I’ll tell myself it’s fine to enjoy Harusoupe. But Taylor Swift and Michael Bublé better up their game.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
