How statistics and SH Labs' detector let us hide AI-generated music on Vernon, with confidence

The dilemma

Vernon promises a crate without AI slop: obscure electronic music made by people. AI-generated tracks reach streaming platforms faster every month, and some of them land in Vernon with the rest of a dig. So every track has to be checked, and that raises a hard question. Hide a suspicious track too early, and you punish a real artist. Wait for a human to look at it, and AI music stays in the crate for hours, sometimes days.

The tool

Every night, the detector of SH Labs listens to the 30-second preview of the tracks that entered Vernon, up to 300 of them. For each one it gives a verdict (human made, processed AI, pure AI) and how confident it is. A track it calls AI with a confidence of 85% or more goes to a review queue, where Vernon's moderators listen and decide: blacklist the track, ban the artist, or clear it.

Until now, that queue was the only gate: a flagged track stayed visible to everyone until a moderator decided.

The measure

Every decision is written in Vernon's moderation journal. So instead of guessing, we counted. Over 16 days, from September 23 to October 9, 2026, our moderators decided 251 tracks the detector had called AI:

• 232 verdicts confirmed: 92.4%.
• 19 false positives, real music the detector got wrong: 7.6% (4.1% of the "pure AI" verdicts, 9.0% of the "processed AI" ones).

Then the number that changed everything: every one of the 19 false positives had a confidence between 85.3% and 91.7%. Not one above. The confirmed verdicts, meanwhile, ran from 85% up to 100%.

The decision

So the data drew the line for us. Since October 9, a track the detector calls AI with a confidence of 92% or more is hidden from visitors right away, while it waits for a human decision. Below 92%, it stays visible until a moderator decides, as before. Either way, a human keeps the last word: a hidden track that turns out to be human comes back the moment it is cleared.

The threshold comes from what we measured on Vernon's own catalog, not from a hunch, and not from a general claim about any detector: it is how SH Labs' verdicts held up against our moderators' ears, on 30-second previews of obscure electronic music.

What we keep doing

We will keep measuring. The journal now keeps every decision, so the same count can be run again as the catalog grows, and the threshold will move if the numbers say so. The moderators still listen to every flagged track, and you can see the artists we confirmed as AI-generated on Vernon's AI artists page.

Thank you, SH Labs

None of this would be possible without a detector good enough to measure. Thank you to the SH Labs team for building it.

Update, October 11, 2026

Two days after this post, SH Labs started analysing a different preview of each track: Deezer's 30-second clip instead of Spotify's, which is sometimes as short as 15 seconds. So we counted again, on 198 tracks released in 2026: half confirmed AI by our moderators, half never flagged. The verdicts moved with the new clips, and two of the 100 human tracks now scored 92.1% and 92.5%. We raised the line to 92.5%. And because the new clips let more AI slip under 85%, moderators now look at every track the detector calls AI with a confidence of 50% or more. The rule that matters stays the same: a human keeps the last word.