Is 'Mi Chico' an AI Song? DJ Goja's Original Credits One Singer: Himself

DJ Goja, the Romanian producer who released 'Mi Chico' on 27 March, has not said that it was made with AI. Neither has Jason Derulo, who joined a second version in June, nor their label, gamma, and neither official YouTube description mentions AI. YouTube's listing for the March single credits one vocalist, DJ Goja himself, and no other singer.

Google's suggestions for the title include 'is mi chico an ai song', 'mi chico ai generated' and, in Polish, 'czy to ai' ('is it AI'). On 20 October the March video on Goja's channel had 67,454,503 views and the June video on Derulo's channel 97,404,502, and on 16 October the June version reached its best place yet on Spotify's worldwide daily chart, 86th, with 1,557,467 streams.

Who sings 'Mi Chico'? What the credits say

The March release, supplied to YouTube by the distributor Vydia, lists three roles, and Goja fills all of them: producer DJ Goja, vocals DJ Goja, composer Ovidiu Marius Goja, his full name. The description under his own video adds a mastering engineer, MAGIC G. No other singer, male or female, is named in either place.

The June release, titled 'Mi Chico (Official - Jason Derulo x Melody)', names three producers (Goja, Derulo and Evangelos Siakas, who also mixed and mastered it), two vocalists, Derulo and the Brazilian singer Melody, and three writers: Goja, Jason Desrouleaux, which is Derulo's birth name, and Shawn Charles. Wikipedia's article on the song says the video was shot in Paris, directed by Kevin Bago, and the video's own description credits the dance duo Les Twins as choreographers.

In an interview Kiss FM Romania published on 24 June, Goja described how the song began. He said he had spent most of the past eight months on Piky Songs, his project of songs for children, and had written about 50 children's songs, some of them well known in Romania. He wanted an Afrobeats track built like a children's song, catchy and repetitive, and chose a Spanish title because, to him, the language sounds like summer. Derulo congratulated him on Instagram once the original took off, the two spent about two weeks on the new version, and Goja said Derulo's voice went perfectly with Melody's. He did not say who sings the original chorus or how it was recorded.

Does Jason Derulo's version reuse the original chorus?

We started with timing. In LRCLIB's timed lyrics, which its users add line by line, the chorus starts at 0:20 in both versions and its first six lines begin within 0.2 seconds of each other. Both run at 112 beats per minute, and the seventh line has new words in June. So the June version keeps the March layout, though a fresh vocal sung over the same track would line up just as closely.

Next we compared the sound itself. Under the two opening choruses, the bass and kick drum matched at 0.96 on our scale, where 1 means identical, while the March chorus and its own repeat later in the song matched at only 0.37, a sign that the backing changes there. The June release appears to keep the March backing track under its first chorus.

Whether it keeps the March voice as well, our test cannot settle. We separated the voice from the music with a standard method that pulls out whatever does not repeat, and the two opening choruses matched at 0.64, more than either chorus matched its own repeat (0.53 in March, 0.44 in June), while unrelated stretches scored under 0.1. But that method leaves some of the backing inside the voice, and the opening pair shares its backing where March's repeat does not, so the beat alone could explain the higher score. The March listing credits its vocals to Goja and the June listing to Derulo and Melody; neither says who sings which line.

What 'Mi Chico' means in English

Mi chico is Spanish for 'my boy', and in everyday Spanish it is how someone speaks of a boyfriend or the guy they are seeing. It is almost the only Spanish in the song. The opening line, “She got the vibe, Mi Chico”, sets a 'she' beside a 'my boy' and lets the title work as a tag rather than a sentence. The other chorus lines invite you to dance all night, to keep watching, to get closer as the night gets hotter.

The March verse describes a woman in a shining silk dress under neon, a glance that leaves the singer hypnotised, slow moves, a racing heart and no need to swap names. The June version keeps that chorus and gives Derulo a new verse about a lover who stopped answering his calls, plus lines about a woman calling him chico. The lyric is simple on purpose, as Goja said he wanted it to be.

Why listeners wonder about AI

The March video never shows anyone singing. The three stills YouTube takes from it show children laughing and dancing outdoors in warm light, and its cover picture is a man in profile against a savanna sunset. The only name on the March vocal credit belongs to the producer.

Listeners have learned to check, and the answers have gone both ways. In our pieces on whether Thiago Navarro is real and on MEOMURU's AI voice, the acts' own statements and labels confirmed AI; in our piece on pupsies and 'misery.', they pointed to a person. For 'Mi Chico', no such statement has been made either way.

Nearly seven months on, No. 2 in Austria and the Netherlands

On YouTube's global Top Songs list for the week ending 15 October the June version was 26th, in its 16th week, with 13,889,445 views, and it sat in the weekly top 100 of 36 countries, second in Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. On Spotify, its best day in Switzerland was fourth and in the Netherlands sixth. Our daily Shazam readings found 'Mi Chico' in the top 50 of 31 countries on 2 October and of 24 on 20 October.

Our prediction is that the Shazam slide slows down: on 1 December, at least 15 national Shazam charts will have 'Mi Chico' in their top 50, against 24 on 20 October.

As the record stands, 'Mi Chico' is DJ Goja's song, credited in March to DJ Goja's voice, and the Derulo version, whose video has 97 million views, appears to share the March backing track under its first chorus. Nothing published says a machine made it, and nothing we measured points either way.