In a world where artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming every industry, the music industry has been disrupted the most. The once-trivial task of distinguishing between human and AI-generated songs has become a major challenge at an unprecedented pace. Imagine scrolling through your favorite music app and listening to an awesome song you have never heard before. Before the age of generative AI, you might have looked up who the artist behind that song is. Now, you have to first ask a different question: Was this song even made by an artist?
Thousands of AI-generated tracks flood music platforms every day, and it’s becoming tougher and tougher to tell them apart from human-made songs. This wave of AI music raises complex questions about ownership, copyright, and fair compensation for artists.
Here at Sureel.ai, we are dedicated to ensuring that artists’ contributions are recognized and protected in this new age of AI music. To address the question of fair compensation of artists, Sureel has built the world’s first AI attribution technology, designed to connect AI-generated songs back to the human artistry that inspired them. Today, we want to focus on another game-changing application of our tech and are proud to announce our latest achievement: The world’s first attribution-powered AI detection system.
How Attribution Helps Detect AI Music
How does our attribution system help with detecting AI-generated songs? At Sureel, we’ve developed a deep understanding of AI music generation by analyzing the inner workings of advanced AI models. This is referred to as Explainable AI. To understand and explain these models, it is important to consider that AI models have “learned” about music by processing thousands to millions of songs, picking up on patterns and sounds that they then recreate in new ways. This allows the AI to generate music that sounds impressively realistic. Sureel’s understanding of how AI models use human music to create AI music serves as the basis for understanding the differences between AI music and human-crafted tracks.
To build our AI detector, we drew from insights from our Sureel Registry, where artists and labels can register their original tracks to protect themselves against unauthorized use by AI. It is also the first platform to allow artists to opt in to AI training, enabling anyone to generate revenue from AI music with guaranteed fair attribution and compensation. The Registry isn’t just a database—it’s a fundamental reference point for human-created music that we process against AI-generated songs every day. Our Registry analyzes the musical essence of each song in the same way an AI would learn from it. This goes far beyond extracting features from the embedding/latent space. Understanding a song completely is only possible by analyzing each instrument, each melody, the recording style, the timbre, and more. We call this the song’s musical “AI DNA”. While AI songs might sound incredibly realistic, their DNA has a different structure than human originals - much like two bird species might look very similar, but have completely different DNA. It is those subtle differences that allow us to identify if AI is present in a track, regardless of whether our ears would pick up on it.
Analyzing Every Detail
Using Sureel’s DNA extraction, we examine every song down to its individual “stems”—the components that make up a song, such as vocals, guitars, or drums. DNA consists of sequences, and so does music. We therefore look for traces of AI across the entire duration of each song, examining it second by second. Just like sequencing DNA tells you when a new section in the genome starts, we detect exactly where the DNA changes from human to AI or vice versa.
The final component of our analysis is a robust confidence estimation. While DNA is a powerful source of information, it can be partially corrupted or missing. While this makes the AI detection more challenging, the amount of corruption of the DNA can be quantified. This allows us to combine our analysis with an assessment of how confident we are in our results.
Our Results: Nearly 99% Accuracy in AI Detection
So, how effective is Sureel’s AI detector? The results speak for themselves. We evaluated our model on more than 100,000 songs, both AI-generated and original human tracks. For that, we analyzed songs by every major AI model, including Suno, Udio, Riffusion, and AI vocal covers.
For detecting whether an entire track is AI-generated, our model reaches nearly 99% accuracy, missing only around half a percent of AI songs. This sets a new record in the industry, demonstrating how powerful Sureel’s attribution engine is.
Additionally, we evaluated our detector on individual stems, second by second, achieving the following results:
• Vocals: 97.0% precision, 97.1% recall
• Instruments (Guitar, Piano, Bass, etc.): 98.1% precision, 97.4% recall
• Drums: 97.2% precision, 96.6% recall
Even on the fine-grained level of instruments or vocals and down to individual seconds, Sureel’s AI detector performs excellently. Less than three percent of AI segments in individual stems are missed by our model, and equally few false alarms are raised for human songs.
Why It Matters: Protecting Music and Ensuring Fair Play
Sureel’s mission is to create a future where human music and AI coexist, with both benefiting from each other. Transparency is key. Our detection tool enables artists, distributors, and streaming platforms to keep a close watch on AI music, protecting human creativity and ensuring artists receive the credit they deserve. Sureel is the world’s first platform where you can not only detect AI content, but also monetize your music with AI, without the risk of being converted into synthetic data and forgotten about. Now, you can prevent your catalog from being flooded with AI songs, while at the same time ensuring your catalog does not get used to create those very AI songs you want to avoid.
We envision a future where AI and human musicians collaborate harmoniously. In the meantime, Sureel makes sure you don’t get left behind. With our AI detector, no AI-generated song you encounter on your favorite streaming app will go unnoticed again. By entering our registry, you can even go a step further and find out whether your catalog influenced that AI song. Reach out to contact@sureel.ai to try out our AI detection and register your music today!
