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MUSIC • MEDIA • TECH| Analysis |
An L.A. Rapper is Accused of Using AI to Sound Like the Smiths and Get on the Hot 100. What Happens Now?
Accusers say that Fenix Flexin (above) evaded detection by using a sketchy AI song generator called Treblo.
Music is experiencing its first professional-cycling-style doping controversy, about a song on the Billboard Hot 100 that could be 100% AI-generated. And like many doping controversies, it may go unresolved, leaving a vague “ick” in the mouths of fans. Whatever the outcome, the episode has revealed how ill-prepared the music industry is when it comes to detecting — let alone policing — fully AI-generated music on the charts.
Fenix Flexin is a L.A. rapper who emerged in the 2010’s with hip-hop group Shoreline Mafia. His latest song, “Rubberz,” is a stylistic departure, a catchy mix of autotuned rap-sung vocals with ’80s post-punk/new wave, like Three 6 Mafia run through the Smiths catalog. Immediately after it was released, it hit #63 on the Billboard Hot 100. One excited fan called it “the song of the summer,” which may be an overstatement, but it has stuck around in the 60s since then, making it Fenix’s highest charting song yet.
Many online commentators, including Anthony Fantano, have noticed that “Rubberz” also sounds a heck of a lot like AI – a little too perfect, the kind of genre-mashup that Suno and other full-song-generators do well. Fenix and his producer Purps on the Beat have denied that the song is AI-generated. But Fenix’s attempts to reproduce the vocal track live have raised some eyebrows: he botched the words to the chorus during an a capella performance, and needed to lipsynch the song on the YouTube show On the Radar.
Collaborating with the Substack Zinstrel, the well-regarded AI song detector HumanStandard first ID’d the track as at least partly human-made, until the founder, Rasha Rahman, got a tip that “Rubberz” had been made on an AI song generator he’d never heard of called Treblo. Rahman played around with it, and saw that he could simulate Fenix’s voice on “Rubberz” perfectly, and that Treblo was even giving him some of the lyrics from the song.
The problem had been that AI detection software can be fooled by tools they haven’t been trained to detect. “We needed to retrain our detection models on enough AI songs from this model,” said Rahman. After he did that, he re-analyzed “Rubberz,” and it came back as “fully AI generated.”
Unlike, say, dopers in pro cycling and Olympic sports, artists using full-song generators aren’t necessarily committing any crimes, although now that streaming platforms are getting more serious about tagging AI-generated music, they may be breaking some rules. But sports fans will recognize some parallels: the cat and mouse games between potential fraudsters and sleuths; the need to update detection technology to catch up to new strategies; the mix of circumstantial evidence and reverse-engineering that fraud-hunters need to draw on. And the potential outcome feels similar: fans left with a ‘yuck’ on their yum, and a lingering mistrust.
What might help? Agreed-upon standards for AI in music across the music streamers, distributors, record labels and publishing industry would add some clarity, and some sort of alignment on detection would improve things. One proposed solution from AI enthusiasts that seems unlikely: for everybody to stop stigmatizing AI use in music. A consensus is forming that fans need to know if a song is 100% AI-generated, or has an AI vocal track.
In the meantime, like some other observers, the Stems team went on Treblo to see if we could recreate Fenix Flexin’s sound ourselves. Treblo is a free tool that operates in a very grey legal area (or, some might say, an almost certainly illegal area); it allows you to create AI vocals mimicking any artist by name. We dropped in Fenix Flexin’s name and tried to approximate one of our favorite Smiths tunes, “Big Mouth Strikes Again.” The results sounded more like the Cure than Johnny Marr, but the vocals are uncannily similar to “Rubberz.”
In other news: Fenix has said that an entirely ‘80s-themed upcoming album is “basically done.”
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