The mysterious singer with millions of streams - but who (or what) is she? Sienna Rose is having a good month. Three of her dusky, jazz-infused soul songs are in Spotify's Viral Top 50. The most popular, a dreamy ballad called Into The Blue, has been played more than five million times. If she continues on this trajectory, Rose could become one of the year's hottest new stars.

The rapid rise of AI-generated art has sparked debate about potential biases in how audiences perceive and evaluate such works. This study investigates how composer information and listener characteristics shape the perception of AI-generated music, adopting a mixed-method approach. Using a diverse set of stimuli across various genres from two AI music models, we examine effects of perceived authorship on liking and emotional responses, and explore how attitudes toward AI, personality traits, and music-related variables influence evaluations. We further assess the influence of perceived humanness and analyze open-ended responses to uncover listener criteria for judging AI-generated music. Attitudes toward AI proved to be the best predictor of both liking and emotional intensity of AI-generated music. This quantitative finding was complemented by qualitative themes from our thematic analysis, which identified ethical, cultural, and contextual considerations as important criteria in listeners' evaluations of AI-generated music. Our results offer a nuanced view of how people experience music created by AI tools and point to key factors and methodological considerations for future research on music perception in human-AI interaction.

How can you tell if your new favourite artist is a real person? There's a new song doing the rounds, and in the immortal words of Kylie Minogue, you just can't get it out of your head. But what if it was created by a robot, or the artist themself is a product of artificial intelligence (AI)? Do streaming sites have an obligation to label music as AI-generated? And does it even matter, if you like what you hear?

Walk My Walk, Livin' on Borrowed Time and We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center topped Spotify's charts this week. Walk My Walk, Livin' on Borrowed Time and We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center topped Spotify's charts this week. Three songs generated by artificial intelligence topped music charts this week, reaching the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts. Walk My Walk and Livin' on Borrowed Time by the outfit Breaking Rust topped Spotify's "Viral 50" songs in the US, which documents the "most viral tracks right now" on a daily basis, according to the streaming service. A Dutch song, We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center, an anti-migrant anthem by JW "Broken Veteran" that protests against the creation of new asylum centers, took the top position in Spotify's global version of the viral chart around the same time.

Online AI platforms for creating music from text prompts (AI music), such as Suno and Udio, are now being used by hundreds of thousands of users. Some AI music is appearing in advertising, and even charting, in multiple countries. How are these platforms being used? What subjects are inspiring their users? This article answers these questions for Suno and Udio using a large collection of songs generated by users of these platforms from May to October 2024. Using a combination of state-of-the-art text embedding models, dimensionality reduction and clustering methods, we analyze the prompts, tags and lyrics, and automatically annotate and display the processed data in interactive plots. Our results reveal prominent themes in lyrics, language preference, prompting strategies, as well as peculiar attempts at steering models through the use of metatags. To promote the musicological study of the developing cultural practice of AI-generated music we share our code and resources.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Feedback has been dimly aware for a while that there is a slew of AI-generated music swamping platforms like Spotify. Our awareness was limited, we confess, because we are so old that we still prefer to listen to CDs. Still, we weren't too surprised when New Scientist's Timothy Revell told us about an indie rock band called The Velvet Sundown that appears to be entirely AI-generated, from their songs, which sound like the beige love-children of Coldplay and the Eagles, to their uncanny-valley Instagram photos, which look like rejected concept art from Daisy Jones & the Six.

AI slop is flooding every single digital platform, and music streaming services are no exception--so much so, even someone who generally avoids AI might find themselves unknowingly listening to a robot hornily singing about butts. Take the sordid saga of "Make Love to My Shitter," an AI-generated track from an artist called BannedVinylCollection. Brace Belden, a host of the popular politics podcast TrueAnon, says that Spotify recently queued up the bawdy song after he'd finished listening to alt-country legend Lucinda Williams' 1992 album Sweet Old World. "I didn't realize the song was AI at first," he says. "I thought it might've been some obscene joke record from the 80s or 90s."

During the height of the Kendrick Lamar–Drake beef earlier this year, disses and responses were flying thick and fast across social media. In the midst of it all, comedian and creator Will Hatcher helped make history when legendary hip-hop producer Metro Boomin sampled Hatcher's song "BBL Drizzy" for his diss track instrumental of the same name. Everyone wanting to take shots at Drake rapped on the beat; Metro Boomin gained notoriety for, according to Billboard, becoming "the first major producer to use an AI-generated sample." Under his alias King Willonius, Hatcher had released "BBL Drizzy" in April, riffing on a Rick Ross post on X that had joked about Drake getting a Brazilian butt lift. The song did well on X as Ross' diss trended, but the viral hype inevitably died down and Hatcher moved along to the next meme.

My editors yell at me for over-using it. So it's natural that I would latch onto Udio.com, a surprisingly capable AI music generator for everything from death metal to female folk rock. The thing is, I'm not sure how long it will be as great as it is right now. Udio works like an AI art generator. You can either specify a prompt and let Udio do all the heavy lifting, from music to lyrics, or get as detailed as you want.

Alison Lomax's presence on the video streaming platform she runs is relatively scant compared with the YouTubers with whom she spends much of her time. But what clips exist succinctly chart the marketing tech revolution she's been navigating: there's a badly framed 12 minutes from 2014 of Lomax lecturing on the rise of influencers working with brands; in another she describes how TV companies woke up to the potential of partnering with YouTube in 2016; and there's her on stage at London's podcast show this year, discussing YouTube's imminent relaunch into the booming audio format. Now, Lomax stands at the "inflection point" of the next hot technology: the generative artificial intelligence behind chatbots such as ChatGPT and image generators such as MidJourney. YouTube, launched in 2005, is no stranger to AI: it is used in its recommendation algorithm; to moderate content; and, latterly, for automatic language translation. "We're committed to embracing AI in a bold way," says Lomax. "But we have to do it really responsibly."