Band shares teaser of Billie Eilish cover, AI steals it

An indie band, Torus, has claimed that artificial intelligence (AI) recreated its cover of Billie Eilish's song from a short snippet shared on TikTok.

Torus has recently shared a series of videos of them performing a grunge-style cover of Billie Eilish's song “Ocean Eyes,” giving a sneak peek into the upcoming release. One of the clips became a hit on TikTok, receiving over 439,000 likes.

However, before the band could release the full song, a similar track appeared on Spotify, BBC reports. The alleged copy was authored by an artist called Independent Lemon, who specializes in covers and has no available information about the person behind it.

Torus believes that someone fed their teaser to AI and asked it to predict the rest of the song.

The band’s drummer, Jack Orr, has told the BBC someone looped the initial clip several times. Then, AI may have made some modifications, such as adding a riff.

With over 676,000 monthly listeners, Independent Lemon is a Spotify-verified artist. However, verification doesn’t require proof that the song was created by a human artist.

While the exact number of AI-generated songs on Spotify is unknown, the platform has removed 75 million tracks created by AI over the past 12 months.

Earlier this year, the music streaming service Deezer announced that over a quarter (28%) of songs uploaded to the platform are fully AI-generated.

AI-generated music is hard to recognize

With AI music flooding streaming services, it is increasingly difficult to determine whether a human or a machine is behind a song.

Nearly all (96%) of 2,000 respondents in a recent Deezer/Ipsos poll were unable to identify which of three songs was AI-generated.

Listeners seem to genuinely enjoy some of these synthetic songs. For example, the AI-generated song “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust hit number one on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart earlier this year.

Meanwhile, artists are pushing back against AI, claiming that models are trained on their music without their permission or compensation.

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