Deezer: 44% of Uploads Are AI, Fueling 'Human Premium' Push

Deezer reports that 44% of tracks uploaded to its platform are AI-generated, and in a Deezer test, 97% of listeners couldn't tell what was AI-generated and what wasn't. More than half of those surveyed said they did care if it was made by AI. The BBC frames the gap, in a piece by Ros Atkins for its 'Value Crisis' series, as the emergence of a 'human premium' for art made by people.

The signals are physical. 'AI-free' and 'human made' labels are already appearing on books, films and albums, and academics are racing to develop a universally recognised symbol modelled on the Fairtrade mark that emerged in the 1980s.

Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King's College London, locates the premium in presence rather than product. 'If I walk into the Sistine Chapel and look at the ceiling, I think not only is that extraordinarily beautiful, but isn't it amazing that a human hand, flesh and blood like my own, came up with that. A mind like mine dreamt that up,' he says. On the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match he makes the same point: 'It wasn't simply the moves on the board that people care about. It's the fact that it's a human being sitting behind them, moving those pieces along that matters.'

Kyle Chayka of The New Yorker, author of *Filterworld*, calls AI output 'generic, obsequious and banal', and argues 'readers are coming to value very obviously personal writing, and maybe even writing that's messier, less structurally sound or composed or perfected, than they maybe once would've desired.' Alex Mahon, CEO of Superstruct Entertainment, bets on liveness: 'People want to go to more live things… They want to have things that are unforeseeable… unpredictable. The special moment is live.'

The piece lands amid a run of related coverage on this feed, including Nicolas Cage refusing Amazon's AI waiver on 'Spider-Noir' and the recent Universal–ElevenLabs licensing deal. The BBC does not name who would run the human-made standard, or set a threshold at which AI involvement would strip the label. The symbol is still being designed.