Back in the 1970’s there was a commercial promoting Memorex recording tapes. They coined the phrase: “Is it Live, or is it Memorex?” Well now we have artificial intelligence (AI) that can produce songs devoid of humans; some not bad and very convincing. Enter an LA-based rapper named Fenix Flexin who is denying that his new hit single was AI-generated, this after extensive allegations.
The song, “Rubberz,” climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 after dropping in June. Many of his peers ‘gassed’ up the track, but listeners immediately noticed something was off. Actually, a lot of things were off. For one, many pointed out that the vocals didn’t sound like Fenix at all, both in terms of the quality of his voice and the fact that this song’s high notes demonstrated that of which he was never able of attaining in his career. His “live” performances are doing him no favor either, as he badly lip-syncs through lyrics which he barely seems to remember and which are borderline nonsensical.[1]
Did we mention he’s singing in a British accent in this new song? This, for some odd reason. And all the while dabbling in a music genre, a bad 1980s synth-pop spoof, and a song that he’s never even attempted before. Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley coming to Fenix’s defense just fueled suspicions further; as Mosley is one of the biggest AI evangelists in the industry. Hmmmmmm.
Among the multiple figures in the music industry calling out Fenix’s track was the producer Medasin, who posted a detailed breakdown on why he believed the track was AI-generated. One embarrassing detail Medasin highlighted was that Fenix apparently posted a snippet of the unfinished track that had “Sonauto” in the file name. Sonauto is the name of an AI music generation software, which incidentally was rebranded to Treblo just two days before his song came out. Hmmmmm.
The Verge pointed out numerous oddities in its own breakdown: The song file contains a “number of artifacts and anomalies that are commonly found in AI-generated music. Hi-hats have a certain brittle quality, the chorus vocals sound like a low-bitrate MP3, and reverb tails haphazardly cut off.”
Getting even more nerdy, songwriter and music podcaster Charlie Harding highlighted some of his own findings to the outlet. “Ghostly backing vocals duck in and out unexpectedly. The drum reverb is full of unnatural digital artifacting reminiscent of a 64kbps MP3 downloaded off of Napster,” Harding told The Verge. “Because most generative AI companies have trained their model on low-quality MP3s of unlicensed copyrighted material, we hear audibly degraded instrumentation.”
After Medasin posted his opinions, Fenix shared a video of him going through a Pro Tools project which allegedly proved he hand crafted the song by hand. But many, including Medasin, were not convinced. He could have easily dropped his AI song into a stem splitter and spread them out in a project file to make it look like they were original recordings. Fenix, for some reason, later deleted the video Rubberz.
The final analysis is that no one can definitively prove if it was Live or AI. Many believe that Fenix is not telling the truth. But considering the low quality of the song itself, it might have reflected on him better, as an artist, if he was just honest. It appears that the music industry will be scrutinizing AI into the future. The entertainment industry is pushing back on AI.
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[1] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/rapper-denies-song-is-ai-generated
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