Something Tangy in the Air

I can’t listen to music while I work. Not on anything. News, yes — CNN, BFM, some long YouTube explanation of something or other. But not music. My ear drifts, naturally, to the harmony, the melody, the form in the air.

So, a few weeks ago, my wife’s Spotify feed handed her something that sounded like Blues. From afar, there was something agreeable about it. It was playing in another room, but enough of it slipped around the corner to reach me. I kind of liked it. Familiar chord changes, guitar riffs, the gravelly voice of the music commonly called Blues.

Then I got a whiff of something tangy. Off. Wrong in the specific way that those two riffs had no business being in the same eight bars. Wrong in the way that that solo had no business opening track one when a completely different kind of solo opens track two. Same album, same name on the cover.

Curious, I went to look. The album art was reassuring: a Black artist of a certain age, in front of a microphone from another age. Where the Hurt Lives. Cool. But every track kept throwing flags, so I finally asked her who this was and how she’d found him. Spotify found him for her, of course. And when she looked up the name, this: “Benny Rivers is an AI-generated artist created with the music of mid-20th century blues and Southern soul in mind.”

Here is the credits panel for the track. Main Artist • Vocals.

Game over.

The EU’s AI Act transparency rules came into force yesterday, and I’d like to think they’ll fix this. They mostly won’t. What they oblige the generator to do is embed a machine-readable mark, like a watermark but invisible, in the file, not a label in front of your ears.

So the machinery for flagging it exists. It’s just been built to be easy to miss, and aimed at the wrong problem. Finding out what Benny Rivers was took me ninety seconds. That was never the hard part. The real problem is that a recommendation engine put him in my wife’s ears without being asked, and nothing in the current arrangement gives it any reason to stop.

Deezer decided otherwise. It detects AI tracks itself and keeps them out of algorithmic recommendations. Which tells you this is a choice, not a technical limitation.