Your phone may soon let you know when the song you’re listening to was made by AI

Generative AI can help even the least musically inclined of us create songs, like with Google’s own Lyria 3-based song-creation tool for Gemini. Understandably, there’s growing concern among music fans that it’s going to be tough to tell when something we’re listening to is an original, human composition and performance, or an AI creation. Just like it does with images, Google labels its AI-generated music with SynthID watermarks, so that even if our ears can’t tell the difference, AI songs can still be detected for what they are. Today we’re checking out a convenient new way that Google may soon support SynthID checks for music.

Right now, Gemini supports scanning media like images, video, and audio files for SynthID watermarks. But in order to analyze them, you’ve got to upload those files to Gemini. And while that works fine, it’s also a bit of a process — first making a recording, then getting it into Gemini and uploading it.

Looking at code strings present in the new version 17.9.50.sa.arm64 update of the Google app for Android, we think we’ve spotted Google working on a much better solution:

The important thing to pay attention to here is that this is talking about the song search tool within the Google app. As you may be aware, Google offers quite a few different ways to identify music, from Now Playing (which just got its own app) to Circle to Search.

While it sounds very handy to build AI music detection right into the same workflow as identifying songs, that also presents a little bit of a mystery: How exactly does Google intend to pull this off?

Unlike Gemini’s SynthID detection, which so far requires uploading a recording to Google’s servers for analysis, Google’s able to identify some songs locally on-device. To achieve that, your phone stores a local copy of a database loaded with acoustic signatures of popular music.

So what does that mean for SynthID? Could Android similarly be getting an on-device way to tell if what you’re hearing is an AI-made song — presumably in real time? That’s certainly one possibility we’re getting from this find, even if we don’t yet have the full picture for how Google might pull that feat off. The worst-cast scenario may be that this only works for published music that Google has already flagged on its end as AI-made, and isn’t a general-purpose SynthID detector for new creations — we just don’t know for sure yet.

Still, it sounds like a useful feature to have, so we’re going to be keeping a eye out for any further advancements on this one — and hopefully get a little more insight into its operation.