Most Artists Are Lying About AI
Eddie (Solo.X) · 2026-10-17
I keep seeing the same story. An artist who went quiet years ago, or who retired, suddenly comes back with a polished new single. The hook is sharp, the production is spotless, the rollout is flawless. A few months earlier, that same artist was online explaining why AI music is soulless and why everyone who makes it is a fraud.
I am not going to name names. I can't prove what is on anyone's hard drive, and that is exactly the point: nobody can. But I will tell you what I believe after years of making music and watching this industry. A lot of those artists are using AI. They use it to find ideas, to write lyrics, to build demos, to fix a vocal, and sometimes, I would bet, to generate a whole song. And in public they say the opposite.
Meanwhile, the artists who are open about it get the door closed in their face.
The numbers say the quiet part out loud
I don't want this to be only my opinion, so I went and looked. The surveys don't agree on how many artists use AI, but they all agree it is not rare.
- A LANDR survey of about 1,200 creators found that 87% use AI somewhere in their process, mostly for technical jobs like mixing and mastering, and about two thirds for creative work too. LANDR's study, via RouteNote. LANDR sells AI tools, so read that number with that in mind.
- Ditto Music's survey put it at about 60% of musicians using AI in their productions. MusicRadar
- A smaller independent poll of producers found a lower number, 36.8%. Bedroom Producers Blog. Even that is more than one in three.
- And the number that matters most: a Pirate Studios survey of 1,141 artists found that fewer than half would tell listeners a track was made with AI. EDM Is Life
The industry knows it. Jimmy Iovine has a name for producers who use AI and say nothing: "closet AI producers". And Dr. Dre has said openly that he uses AI as a tool, to see what it does with what he just made. Gizmodo
So somewhere between one in three and nearly nine in ten artists use it, depending on who you ask, and a lot of them will not say so. Not everyone who stays quiet is a bad person. Some are scared of the backlash, and I understand that. But when you publicly shame other artists for doing what you do in private, that is not fear. That is lying.
Meanwhile, the sites built to help you get heard are closing up
The platforms that say they exist to help artists find fans are drawing hard lines, and the lines land on the artists who are honest. Here is what they say they do today:
- Deezer tags AI albums and keeps fully AI-generated tracks out of its recommendations and editorial playlists. It says AI passed half of all daily uploads in June 2026, around 90,000 a day, while making up only 1% to 3% of total streams. TechCrunch
- Bandcamp banned music made wholly or in substantial part with generative AI in January 2026, in a post called Keeping Bandcamp Human. "Substantial part" is not defined. Bandcamp
- Spotify allows AI music with disclosure, shows how AI was used through industry metadata, and says it removed more than 75 million spam tracks in a year. Tracks caught by its spam filter are kept out of recommendations and playlists. Mixmag
- Musosoup, a service where artists pitch their music to curators and blogs, does not accept fully AI-generated music. Musosoup
- Tidal accepts AI music, but tags it and holds it to a higher integrity standard. Tidal
- Apple Music is adding visible Made With AI labels to songs. DJ Mag
Some of this is reasonable. Spam is real. Cloning a real artist's voice without permission is wrong, and I have no problem with that being banned. I don't even mind labels. What bothers me is where the line gets drawn, and who ends up on the wrong side of it.
Nobody can draw the line
Deezer says its detector is 99.8% accurate at spotting fully AI-generated tracks from tools like Suno and Udio. That is Deezer's own figure, and it is about fully generated songs. TechCrunch Hybrid tracks are the hard case: human-played parts, heavy processing, or AI used only for lyrics and melody ideas. I could not find a reliable published number for those.
Now put that next to what listeners can do. In a survey run by Ipsos for Deezer, 9,000 people in eight countries listened to three tracks. 97% could not correctly tell the AI-generated ones from the human-made one. Deezer's newsroom
Think about what that means in practice. The artist who writes a prompt, picks the best take, and says honestly "made with AI" gets tagged, filtered and kept off the playlists. The artist who used AI to write the lyrics, the melody and the demo, then re-recorded it and said nothing, sails straight through. The rule doesn't punish AI. It punishes honesty.
What the influencers say
When Xania Monet, an AI R&B act whose lyrics are by Talisha Jones and whose vocals and music are generated with Suno, signed a reported $3 million deal and had a song reach number one on the R&B Digital Song Sales chart, the reaction from well-known artists was loud. Kehlani said publicly that an AI act was getting a top-five R&B album while nobody was doing the work. SZA questioned whether the industry would treat other genres that way, and raised concerns about the environmental cost of AI. Blavity For the background on how the act is made, see NYU's JIPEL. Years earlier, Nick Cave called AI lyrics written in his style a mockery of being human. Decrypt
These are real positions from real artists, and some of the concerns, like consent, pay and energy use, deserve real answers. But notice what is missing from the loudest reactions: any admission that the other side of the argument includes people like Dr. Dre, and Timbaland, who is a strategic advisor to Suno and describes AI as an assistant that suggests new ways to rearrange his drum patterns.
The argument is not AI or no AI. That ship has sailed. The argument is who is allowed to admit it.
We have heard this before
Drum machines were cheating. Sampling was theft. Auto-Tune was fake. Sequencers, loops, presets and sample packs were each, in their day, the death of real music. Today nobody asks whether your kick drum is real. Nobody should be asking whether your song was imagined with the help of a model, either. They should be asking whether it moves them.
Why I built Latido
I'm Eddie. I make music as Solo.X, and I built Latido because I got tired of watching honest artists get treated as the problem.
On Latido, AI-made music is not something to hide or be ashamed of. It is the point. Tracks show how they were made: the tool and the style tags, and, when the artist shares them, the prompt, the lyrics and the story behind the song. Nobody gets marked down for saying how they made it. All we ask is that the music is yours and that you don't pretend to be someone else. Impersonating a person or a brand is not allowed.
I don't think the answer is to hide AI, or ban it, or guess at it. I think the answer is to say it out loud and let the song speak.
If you use AI, say so. If you don't, great, and I mean that. But stop treating the artists who are open about it as the problem. The problem is the pretending.
Use the tools. Tell the truth about it. Let the music speak.
Share your first track on Latido, free: latido.fm/upload
A note on the facts
The survey numbers come from companies with their own interests: LANDR sells AI tools, and Deezer commissioned the Ipsos survey and licenses its AI detection tool to others. Treat them as signs of where things are, not the final word. Platform policies are as publicly reported in October 2026, and they change often. I have not named any artist as using AI, because I have no way to know. If I got something wrong, write to me through the contact page and I will fix it.