Rubberz Pt 2: The Tech – How They Caught It

BAAH ZOO

We're back on PLUG RADIO. Bahh Zoo here with Marty Mar and Ain't Tee, and this is the tech part of the Rubberz story. If you missed it, Rubberz by Fenix Flexin is the first fully AI-generated song to hit the Billboard Hot 100. Peaked at fifty-eight. Now let's talk about how people figured it out.

MARTY MAR

Because the man had session files. He posted Pro Tools screenshots. On the surface, that looks like proof.

BAAH ZOO

On the surface. Here's the thing a lot of people don't know. These days you can take a finished song, any song, even one made by AI, and run it through stem-splitting software. That pulls it apart into separate tracks: the vocal on one, the drums on one, the bass on one. Then you drop those tracks into Pro Tools and boom, it looks like a real session.

AINT 'TEE

So the receipts were basically a costume.

BAAH ZOO

A very convincing costume. That's why producers said session screenshots alone don't prove a song was recorded by people. So they listened closer. Producer Medasin and reporting from The Verge pointed to what they called artifacts and anomalies.

MARTY MAR

Break that down for the folks at home.

BAAH ZOO

Aight...Think about a photo where somebody has six fingers. Your brain knows something's wrong even if you can't say why. AI music has its own version of that. On Rubberz, people heard digital artifacting, kind of a smeary, watery sound around the edges. They heard brittle hi-hats, where the cymbals sound thin and crunchy instead of crisp. And they heard an inconsistent vocal flow, where the delivery shifts in ways a real performer usually wouldn't.

AINT 'TEE

So the song had six fingers. I love that.

BAAH ZOO

Then came the clue that cracked it. Before the song dropped, Fenix shared a snippet. The file name on that snippet was Sonauto dot M P 3. And Sonauto was the name of an AI music platform that rebranded as Treblo right before the release.

MARTY MAR

That's the kind of mistake that ends investigations.

BAAH ZOO

Medicine went further. He showed that if you gave Treblo some basic prompts, you could get output with that same vocal style and even similar lyrical phrases. That's like matching a fingerprint.

AINT 'TEE

And then the company itself stepped in, right?

BAAH ZOO

Right. In August, Treblo released a classifier. That's a detection tool trained to recognize music that came out of its own model. They ran Rubberz through it and it came back very likely Treblo. The company says its false positive rate is less than one in ten thousand. Meaning it should almost never flag a human song by mistake.

MARTY MAR

And their co-founder, Ryan Tremblay, confirmed it.

BAAH ZOO

He did. Now, here's the part I want everybody listening to really hear. That detector only checks for one company's AI. There are a lot of AI music tools out there. So we can't count on one company catching everything. That's why the industry is pushing for transparency. Streaming platforms are moving toward things like AI persona tags, labels that tell you up front if you're listening to an AI-generated act.

AINT 'TEE

Like a nutrition label. Ingredients: one human, maybe.

BAAH ZOO

Exactly. And look, I'm the tech guy. I'm not anti-tech. AI can be a tool. Producers use software for everything already. Drum machines, samplers, Auto-Tune, all of that was controversial once. But a tool and a replacement are two different things. If you use AI to help you finish your idea, that's one conversation. If the machine is the artist and you just put your name on it and don't tell anybody, that's a whole other conversation.

MARTY MAR

And that's exactly the line the labels are trying to draw with that phrase, substantially human-made.

BAAH ZOO

Right. The question nobody has fully answered yet is, how much human is enough? Ten percent? Half? Who measures it? That's the next big fight in music tech.

AINT 'TEE

Okay, I've been patient. I have been so patient. Because y'all are giving the how. I'm about to give the who said what.

MARTY MAR

Ain't Tee has the Tea Desk next. Stay with us.

BAAH ZOO

This is PLUG RADIO. whether Human, Half and Half, or All the way A.I. wit it... if you got the music , we got the plug