Artists can now check whether their music has been used to train AI

Musicians including SZA and Kenneth Blume (fka Kenny Beats) have expressed fears over the use of their music to train AI models amidst an ongoing investigation from The Atlantic.

In September 2025, The Atlantic launched an investigation into the "inner workings of generative AI" and how AI models are trained, creating an exploration of datasets across media to "see whose work tech companies are using".

Earlier this month, an update from journalist Alex Reisner was published with a focus on music, titled ‘The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music’ – the latest part of his AI Watchdog project.

The article came alongside a new search tool for songs used by AI music creation platforms from Google and Stability AI, though it is not completely exhaustive.

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While some of the most popular dance music artists including Skrillex, Peggy Gou and BICEP have had dozens of songs scraped, per the tool, underground musicians have also found their music through AI Watchdog, with some taking to Reddit to share their discoveries.

The tool encourages users to search through millions of tracks across four datasets, most licensed under Creative Commons and requiring credit to be given to the artist when used, “forbidding use” in commercial projects.

"AI companies may omit certain works when training, so the presence of a work in a dataset is not definitive proof that it was used," reads a description next to the tool. "Note that some datasets contain multiple copies of certain works."

In a post shared to X yesterday (June 21), Kenneth Blume slammed AI music generator Suno, which The Atlantic said in its investigation is also used as a "listening platform much like Spotify or YouTube".

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"You are true losers," he said after tagging Suno. "I can’t imagine going into work daily knowing you are stealing from countless struggling musicians. I can’t imagine being proud to earn a paycheck obliterating the work and dreams of artists."

Similarly, SZA took to Instagram stories over the weekend, revealing that AI Watchdog had identified that 238 of her tracks were used to train AI models, some she believes are unreleased.

"If you’re a musician and you support this degenerate shit, you’re disgusting and there’s NOTHING YOU COULD EVER SAY TO ME TO MAKE THIS OKAY," she wrote.

Read ‘The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music’ by Alex Reisner here, and search using the AI Watchdog tool here.

Gemma Ross is Mixmag’s Associate Digital Editor