How to Tell If a Song Is AI Generated (and Filter AI Music on Spotify, Deezer and YouTube Music)

How to Tell If a Song Is AI Generated (and Filter AI Music on Spotify, Deezer and YouTube Music)

You hear a track on a chill playlist. The mix is clean, the title is generic, the artist is one you have never heard of with a catalog that seems to have appeared from nowhere. That is usually the moment people start asking how to tell if a song is AI generated. The question is no longer niche. Deezer says it now receives nearly 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day, which on peak days is more than half of everything delivered to the platform.

Two honest caveats before the how-to. Detection is probabilistic, and labels depend on what the uploader declared. A track with no AI label is not proof that a human made it, and a labeled track is not a scandal. What follows is what your streaming app actually shows you today, what you can check by hand, and how to clean up a playlist that has already picked up a few.

Your ears are the weakest tool you have

Start here, because it saves a lot of wasted listening. Deezer commissioned an Ipsos survey of 9,000 people across eight countries in November 2025, and 97% could not tell the difference between AI-generated and human-made music in a blind test. That is not a comment on anyone's taste. It is a measurement of how little the audio itself gives away.

Software does better, and not by listening harder. Deezer's detector looks for artifacts left behind by generative models, and says those artifacts are usually inaudible to humans and rarely found in real recorded music. It is tuned to the signatures of the most prolific generators, such as Suno and Udio.

So the reliable signals are not sonic. They are credits, metadata, and the behavior of the account that uploaded the track. Listeners clearly want this sorted out: in that same survey, 80% agreed that 100% AI-generated music should be clearly labeled to listeners.

What each service shows you right now

Checked 30 October 2026. This area is moving quickly, so re-check before you rely on it.

Three different philosophies in one table: Deezer detects and filters, YouTube Music labels, Spotify credits.

Deezer: the only user-facing filter announced so far

Deezer was the first streaming platform to explicitly label AI-generated music, in June 2025, and says over 14 million albums have been tagged since. Detected tracks are automatically removed from algorithmic recommendations and are not included in editorial playlists.

The part most readers want is the toggle. On 13 October 2026, Deezer announced an on/off toggle that will be available before the end of 2026 and will let users exclude AI-generated content as they search for music. With it active, AI-generated tracks, albums and the related artists will not be included in search results, and you can deactivate it at any time to get them back. It is scoped to fully AI-generated music rather than to records that used AI somewhere in the process. Nothing to switch on yet: as of the date on this post, it is announced, not shipped.

Two details worth knowing. The AI tag is applied at the album level rather than the track level, deliberately, to reduce errors. And Deezer claims an accuracy of 99.8%, with roughly 2 missed tracks in every 1,000 AI-generated ones. Deezer has also said it will take down generative-AI tracks used to generate fraudulent streams, along with those not streamed for six months or more. If this is shifting how you feel about where your library lives, our Deezer vs Spotify comparison covers the rest of the trade-offs.

YouTube Music: a label on the player

YouTube Music started rolling out labels to make it easier to see when a song was created primarily using generative AI. The label sits directly on the player page, and tapping it opens a simple menu with more information. The labels come from a mix of music partner work and YouTube's own detection tools.

The declaration side matters for how much a label means. Partners can mark a delivery as Fully Gen AI, meaning all content was created using generative AI, or Partly Gen AI, meaning part of it was. If no value is supplied, YouTube interprets it as unknown unless it can make a determination from other signals, and it may still designate content as fully or partly Gen AI on that basis.

The definitions are stricter than most people assume. YouTube lists standard pitch correction such as Auto-Tune on a live vocal as an example of No Gen AI, along with automated AI mastering software adjusting equalization, compression and sonic balance. "No Gen AI" means no generative AI, not no software.

Spotify: credits, not a switch

Spotify has not announced a listener-facing AI filter in anything referenced here. What it has is disclosure. In a beta launched on April 16, artists can share how they have used AI in their music, and where they disclosed through their label or distributor you see credits for specific contributions like vocals, lyrics or production in Song Credits on mobile.

Read the limit in Spotify's own framing: because the system depends on artist disclosure, the absence of a credit does not mean AI was not used.

Around that sit two enforcement pieces. Spotify announced a music spam filter that identifies uploaders and tracks engaging in spam tactics, tags them and stops recommending them, and said it had removed over 75 million spammy tracks in the preceding 12 months. Separately, vocal impersonation is only allowed in music on Spotify when the impersonated artist has authorized the usage.

Five checks you can run yourself

None of these is proof. Treat each one as a reason to look closer, not a verdict.

1. Open the credits panel first. On Spotify, check the track's Song Credits on mobile, where AI contributions appear if the artist disclosed them. On Deezer, look for the automatic AI label. On YouTube Music, look at the player page.
2. Look at the upload pattern. Spotify names the tactics it filters: mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks and artificially short tracks, all easier now that AI tools let anyone generate large volumes of music. An artist page that behaves like a conveyor belt is a reason to inspect a specific track, not a ruling on it.
3. See whether anything exists outside the app. Live dates, interviews, a social account with history, a photograph of a person. Absence proves nothing, since plenty of real artists stay private, but this is the one check no detector runs for you.
4. Be careful with surprise features from famous voices. Since vocal impersonation needs the impersonated artist's authorization on Spotify, an unannounced duet with a superstar is worth checking against that artist's official channels before you share it.
5. Do not score the audio. See the 97% figure above. If your conclusion rests on the vocals sounding slightly plastic, you have a hunch, not a finding.

Cleaning the slop out of a playlist you already own

1. Pick one playlist and work on whichever service shows you the most. Today that means Deezer, for its labels, or YouTube Music, for the player label.
2. Play through it with the credits or label view open, and flag rather than delete on the first pass.
3. Remove only the ones you are confident about. A false positive costs a real artist a listener, and even Deezer's detector allows for fewer than 1 incorrect flag in every 10,000 genuine human-made tracks.
4. Refill the gaps on purpose instead of letting autoplay do it.
5. Expect the labeling to differ if you move the playlist. Deezer identifies AI content with its own detector and YouTube Music combines partner declarations with its own tools, so a track flagged on one service may show nothing on another.

That last step is where a transfer tool earns its place. If you clean a playlist on Deezer and then want it on Apple Music, you do not want to redo the work by hand. Free Your Music can move a playlist between music services covering playlists, liked songs, albums and followed artists, and it matches tracks by the industry-standard ISRC code where it is available, falling back to title, artist, album and duration when it is not. Anything it cannot match perfectly is flagged for one-tap Rematch rather than dropped, so a cleaned playlist does not quietly gain or lose entries on the way over. Every one-time transfer is free, with no song limit and no card. A transfer Spotify to Apple Music runs just as happily in reverse.

One thing to watch: Keep in sync is a Premium feature that brings new songs from the source across to the copy once a day, so do your cleanup on the source side, not only on the copy. For the wider picture of where all this is heading, see our roundup of AI in music trends.

FAQ

Can I block AI music on Spotify?

Not with a switch, based on what Spotify has announced. Its published approach is disclosure in Song Credits plus a spam filter that tags spam uploaders and tracks and stops recommending them. The announced listener-facing toggle is Deezer's, due before the end of 2026.

Does a missing AI label mean a song is human-made?

No. Spotify states that the absence of a credit does not mean AI was not used, and YouTube interprets a missing partner declaration as unknown unless its own signals support a determination.

Is anyone actually listening to AI tracks?

Far less than the upload numbers suggest. Deezer says fully AI-generated music accounts for between 1 and 3% of its streams, and that the primary purpose of uploading these tracks is fraudulent. Up to 85% of streams on fully AI-generated tracks were identified as fraudulent in 2025 and demonetized.

Does using Auto-Tune make a song AI generated?

No. Under YouTube's disclosure guidance, standard pitch correction on a live vocal performance counts as No Gen AI, as does automated AI mastering.

Do listeners actually want a filter?

The Deezer and Ipsos study found that nearly half, 45%, of music streaming users would like to filter out 100% AI-generated music from their streaming platform.