Humanable: Separating human-made music from soulless A.I.

It’s often difficult to separate reality from fantasy or fact from fiction today. As we increasingly move toward AI, tech advancements allow for computer-generated “creative” work that can sometimes actually…trick us. From artificial intelligence artwork and books to “deepfake” videos, the tools used to create artificial art and entertainment have suddenly become quite sophisticated.

Unfortunately, that has also affected the music business. A.I. music has invaded creative space, and real artists now compete with soulless content crafted from data instead of from the heart.

To help solve this problem, a new enterprise—still in its first year of operation—called Humanable aims to separate real music from “fake” music and identify real music made with the human touch.

The company stamps its approval on music crafted by human hands. Humanable evaluates a track for a small fee and deems it “100% human-made.” This assures both listeners and recording industry folks that they’re experiencing the real deal.

“As a group, the overriding motive for creating this company was to protect songwriters and artists from generative AI siphoning off their royalties and imitating human creativity,” explained Humanable CEO Tim Wipperman. “Technology can help ferret out generative A.I. after the A.I. generated song or track is in the marketplace, but technology is a never-ending cycle of whack-a-mole. The bad guys do X, and the good guys catch them. Then the bad guys figure a way around the technology.”

Wipperman said Humanable helps stop that cycle by approaching the problem “from the point of creation.”

“Bots and generative AI don’t have social security numbers and driver’s licenses. Humans do,” he explained. “We ask the writer or artist to register with us as a human, receive a unique personal identifier, then for each song or master, upload it with some info, and that song/master receives another unique identifier that the artist verifies is humanly created. We have audit processes as checks to be sure everyone is truthful.”

He said, “They then are able to use our Humanable trademark,” describing it as “sort of a musical ‘certified organic’ image.” The artist may use it “in all their dealings with publishers, record companies, distributors, and DSPs.”

Wipperman said this certification “guarantees to all those downstream folks that a human created the music. It eliminates legal issues with copyrights and ownership and generates full royalty streams.”

So far, the company is off to a good start, considering it just launched in the fall of 2024.

 “We have, at this point, over 4 million songs registered with Humanable,” Wipperman said.

Many artists in bluegrass pride themselves on the heartfelt originality of their songwriting. While other genres, such as pop, are already quite infused with computer-driven music and production techniques, most roots music tends to be more stripped down and genuine. That makes the idea of AI-created music even more of an affront to artists who consider authenticity a central feature of what they do. Based on his background, Wipperman might truly “get it” about how devastating AI-generated tracks might be to roots genres.

“My background was as a music publisher,” he said, explaining that he ran Warner Chappell for 29 years. He’s also an artist himself. “I played on Earl Scruggs' 25th Anniversary album.”

Each team member at Humanable brings a different strength.

“One of our founders is an intellectual property lawyer. Another has been in the arts since she was little,” he said. “We all have a love for writers and artists, and the right to make a decent livelihood from music. Our long-term goal is to have all human writers/artists join us and give the business entities an incentive to use music created by humans,” he summarized. “A Humanable song or track assures them they are publishing, releasing, and streaming a musical work that is clean.”