Could you tell if your favourite song was made with AI? The viral ‘Papaoutai’ cover controversy suggests not
Publish Date: 2026-03-10 13:14:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
Would it be obvious if artificial intelligence (AI?) created your new favourite song?
Millions of listeners have recently encountered that question through a viral Afro-soul cover of Papaoutai, the 2013 hit by Belgian artist Stromae. The cover has skyrocketed in popularity across streaming platforms and social media.
But unknown to most audiences, it was created using AI, according to Deezer, a French music-streaming service.
The Afro-soul cover highlights a growing challenge — the difficulty identifying when generative AI has been used in production — and how audiences, platforms and artists are struggling to respond.
When Stromae first released the upbeat dance song Papaoutai as part of the album Racine carrée, it topped the charts in Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands and Switzerland. More than a decade after release, it’s still one of the most-viewed French-language songs on YouTube.
The video for Stromae’s Papaoutai.
Some 12 years later, in December 2025, an Afro-soul cover of Papaoutai was uploaded to Spotify. While it’s hard to track the exact reach of the song due to various removals and re-uploads on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, the song currently has almost 80 million streams on Spotify.
The authorship of the Afro-soul version is commonly attributed to mikeeysmusic — a Swedish musician with a verifiable social media presence and discography — Chill77, whose identity is difficult to verify, and Unjaps, an independent record label. None of the artists have made a public statement about the controversy.
Why does all of this matter? Most music platforms lack clear labelling for AI music, and this places the difficult task of identification on listeners.
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