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 the momentum holds, and she continues on this trajectory, Rose could become one of the year's hottest new stars. There's only one problem: mounting evidence indicates she's not real.
Streaming service Deezer, which has developed tools to tackle AI music said"many of her albums and songs on the platform are detected and flagged" as computer-generated. Look closer and you'll see the telltale signs of an AI artist. Rose has no social media presence, has never played a gig, has no videos, and has released an improbable number of songs in a short span of time.
Between 28 September and 5 December, she uploaded at least 45 tracks to streaming services. Even Prince, an artist known for relentless creative output, would have struggled to match that figure. Her Instagram account, which is currently deactivated, featured a strangely homogenous series of headshots, all showing the soft, unreal lighting that's characteristic of AI image generators.
Then there's the music itself. Songs like Into the Blue and Breathe Again sit neatly next to Norah Jones or Alicia Keys, full of jazzy guitar lines and buttery smooth vocals. But many listeners have noted what they have identified as "AI artefacts". Play Under the Rain or Breathe Again and you'll hear a faint but persistent hiss running throughout the tracks. That's a common trait of music generated on apps like Suno and Udio - partly because of the way they start with white noise and gradually refine it until it resembles music.
It's this quirk that enables Deezer to flag AI songs. "When the software adds all the layers and the instruments, it introduces errors. They're not perceptual, we cannot listen to them, but they're easy to spot if you do a few mathematical operations. The errors act like a fingerprint, with a "unique signature" that means it's possible to detect which piece of software was used to create any piece of music. For casual listeners, there are other signs: inconsistent drum patterns, bland lyrics, and a singer who never strays from the melody or lets loose on the final chorus. For many of Sienna Rose’s listeners, it is this unmistakably generic sound that has raised the strongest suspicions.
"I was like, 'I like this', but there was something that was very 'uncanny valley'," said TikTok music critic Elosi57. "So I took a peek at her profile and I was like, 'This is AI'." Another user posted on X: "Started listening to Olivia Dean. Within two days Spotify recommended Sienna Rose, who has a similar, but more generic sound. Took me a few songs to realise she's AI. To be fair, many others have fallen for Rose's songs. Among them is pop star Selena Gomez, who used the Rose track Where Your Warmth Begins as the background for an Instagram post about Sunday's Golden Globes”.
The song was later removed when questions about Rose's identity spread online, but Gomez's post took interest in Rose and her identity to a new level. And many of the listeners who'd been playing Rose's music reacted with dismay when they learned she might not exist.
Of course, it's entirely possible that everyone has got it wrong, and Sienna Rose is a real singer who shuns the limelight. Maybe she's in witness protection. Perhaps she's a real singer, stuck in a contractual dispute with her label, and releasing music under a pseudonym. If so, I'm sorry. It must be crushing to have your music labelled as soulless "slop". But that's indicative of the problem facing the entire music industry right now. AI software is becoming so sophisticated that clone artists are competing with genuine musicians.
In Sweden this week, a chart-topping song was banned from the charts after journalists discovered the artist behind it, Jacub, didn't exist. There is no shortage of advocates for AI within both the tech sector and the commercial side of the music industry. The costs of launching an act like Sienna Rose are practically zero, but her music is making an estimated £2,000 in royalties per week.
Compare that to the K-Pop industry, where labels invest an average of $1m (£750,000) per member of a girl or boy group per year, and you can see the attraction. Interestingly, several of Rose's songs appear to be credited to US indie record label Broke - who have a track record in turning viral artists into chart stars.
They got into trouble late last year for creating a song using an AI clone of Jorja Smith's voice. Their song, Run, was removed from streaming services after record industry bodies issued takedown notices, alleging the track violated copyright - but was re-recorded with human vocals, and entered the UK Top 10 two weeks ago. Currently, a backlash against AI music is growing, with major stars such as Paul McCartney protesting against companies training their AI models on copyrighted work without permission.