Posted by flinner 18 hours ago
Now I just go and look for new albums from bands I know I like. I wish there was a pre-2023 filter for the algorithmic feed.
If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a shitty song comes up, skip it. If AI slop is flooding Spotify with shitty songs, they'll naturally fail algorithmically (assuming we trust Spotify to actually be honest about its algos, which I'll admit we shouldn't https://substack.com/@tedgioia/note/c-236242253)
If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a catchy impressive song comes up, what you do is you _listen to it_ and you _fucking enjoy it_. This knee-jerk disgust reaction of "ugh I worry that it's AI" has no place in your heart in that moment. You're just sitting listening to your plastic-and-rare-earth earbuds reproduce digitized waveforms and paying attention to what the music evokes in you. It seems ridiculous to me that we get distracted by questions about "but what if this music isn't made by a human". Insofar as you're a music-enjoyer, listening to music, the only question should be _is it good_. It shouldn't matter if it was created by duck or slug.
The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter and I don't have as strong opinions there. I think we should ideally incentivize people who use AI in generating their music to disclose their usage, though I have no idea if it's possible to do so, so that consumers who care about only supporting human artists with their listenship-stats can filter to that group. And certainly anyone who closely imitates _a specific artist_, crossing the line from "inspired by" and "shamelessly ripping off", should be severely disincentivized from doing so, whether they used AI or not.
By the same logic, would you say that people refusing to eat there have "a disconnect between their culinary tastes and their values?" Or, if people have a visceral reaction to some other fast food joints surreptitiously introducing the same magic ingredient in their food, would you also tell them to _just eat it_ and _fucking enjoy it_?
The source matters, both for meat and art. It's part of the product itself, you cannot disentangle the taste and sound of the performance from the way it was produced. AI art trying to pass as human art is simply a form fraud, and some people will always reject it, while others are of course free to embrace it and enjoy it.
Content is graded on both instant appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "popcornmeter") and artistic appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "tomatometer").
I firmly believe that AI generated content cannot have any artistic appeal, because I believe art is fundamentally an invocation of human expression. This might be fine in some contexts, but in general I'd prefer consuming content from groups that I trust to strike a good balance between these types of appeal (e.g. A24 movies).
If you skip every song because you don't immediately like it, then you never learn to refine you palette.
There is then indeed a real fear when a song comes up catered to you, that says nothing about the artist, but was generated to keep you listening. You're getting pidgeonholed.
I'd like to point out that there's absolutely no way an Instagram account that is not even a month old gets hundreds of thousands of likes almost every upload. That should be an immediate red flag to everyone, Instagram included.
Another thing worth pointing out is that iTunes charts in 2026 are pretty meaningless. Do you buy music on iTunes? Does anyone else you know buy music on iTunes? Even those that still buy music have at least 3-4 more relevant stores to chase after. It's like finding a niche book category on Amazon, anyone could astroturf their way to the top 100 and I doubt it'd cost you more than for a legitimate artist to even rent a studio to record an album properly.
I find also that much like junk food, AI music is optimized to be catchy. The initial feeling I get is “yeah this is nice”, but then you realize the lyrics are weird, some words don’t exist, the voice is off…
Some of my music is available om SoundCloud. Most of it is made on an iPhone. https://on.soundcloud.com/lHJN26CwcwtnQzc2CB
Band-in-a-Box is a commercial program that has been around since 1990. What it did then was let you specify a chord progression, style, tempo, and instruments and it would make a generate a MIDI track. I think it might have also been able to take a melody and come up with a chord progression for it in a style/genre of your choosing.
The target market was musicians. Instrumentalists used it generate tracks to improvise or solo with for example, and songwriters found it useful to essentially have a full band at their beck and call while composing.
Over the years they added more features, and switched to sounds from recordings of real instruments played by real musicians. They have very good stretching and pitch transposition so you can use these at a range of tempos and keys and they still sound good.
It is still aimed at musicians, and can be overwhelming to others. This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It is not something the kind of person who just wants to describe what they want to hear and have a song produced would enjoy. But if an AI could operate it for them, maybe that would work and the result would be something with much better sounding instruments than the AI song makers (and without the risk of including unlicensed copyrighted material).
I’ve actually taken some of my own compositions and run them through Suno using the “Cover” option, and it’s pretty nuts what it can do.
What would be really cool is the concept of combining a physical arranger keyboard (like a Yamaha PSR-SX) with real-time orchestration produced by a backing generative model.
It's impossible to exaggerate how true this is. I often say "BiaB is the best worst software - or should that be 'worst best software'? - I've ever used." A toolbar that crams dozens of tiny icons, almost no visual hierarchy, dated visual style, waaaay too many dialogs (dialogs within dialogs!), zero discoverability, inconsistent labeling, basic features missing...I could go on. To add insult to injury, I'm using the Mac version and it looks/feels like a port, not a native app.
I like the direction Apple is taking with their digital audio workstation, Logic Pro X. While not overtly AI, they've been introducing intelligent musical features starting with their Drummer feature several years before AI became commonplace.
Especially important if you want orchestral instruments that sound realistic. Just think of the many ways that a single note can be played by a professional player and multiply that by the range of the instrument.
Edited to add: not orchestral instruments, and also not samples, but this gives an idea of the complexities of capturing the characteristics of an amplifier so that it can be modeled faithfully: https://neuraldsp.com/quad-cortex-updates/introducing-tina (I'm not related and I'm actually a Line6 customer, but I saw this at work in an interview by Rick Beato and though it was super interesting)
Rick Beato travels to NeuralDSP in Finland.
IIRC the samples in this program were actual performances, so I'm curious how they captured all the variations...
Wow, I haven't heard that name since... well, since the software was relatively new.
I do like the idea of an AI music tool that lets you have that kind of workflow, choosing a level of granularity (and, presumably, being able to edit the intermediate results etc.).
The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.
Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.
You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
Yes.
You will owe royalties.
The latter part is the actual problem.
A) it would be impossible to find in a sea of AI generated slop
B) even if it were to be recognized as good, it would be instantly copied by other AI’s such that it would be very shortly thereafter be also considered slop
For any work to gain traction with an audience, there needs to be scarcity. Art and artists are valued because they are unique in some way, something about it or them cannot be replicated by others. The ability to instantly produce a piece of “art” negates any artistic value, at least as far as audiences are concerned.
as with all art, the hardest part is discovery
artificial scarcity is indistinguishable from greed
I’ve found some of my favourite music in the last decade, during a time in my life by which it’s generally considered that your tastes are set.
When you move into an apartment or furnish a rental or whatever you might put stuff up on the wall. For many years that might just be some mass-produced prints from IKEA, for example. These might be photos or paintings but a lot of them are "abstract". For this kind of application, current generative AIs are probably sufficient to create what I'd call "wall fillers".
So if you were doing an indie game, it might not be large enough to pay for artists to come up with music or even some basic art assets but an AI can I think fill this role. You can use them as placeholders.
So I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of artists. There is certainly an issue with how these LLMs are trained and if that's "stealing". Legally and ethically we're still working this out because the issue is new.
But I also think there are some things you just don't need an artist for.
> and partly due to resistance from creatives
For what it's worth, I support manned spaceflight. But sometimes allowing "creatives" to impede progress has its costs.
Quite the opposite, many have given up fortunes and prosperous businesses to move into spaceflight.
Anyway, someone may not want to pursue spaceflight for the money, but everything involved in spaceflight still costs a lot of money, which has to be justified. So I think the phenomenon is still there; people still want to appear to be proving themselves through appearing to work hard and appearing to be needed.
I don't live in the US. But I recognize the American system for what it does well.
But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?
Isn’t this an argument against all new music, even human made?
Either we have it all already, or there’s room for new things that we haven’t heard before.
You're just going to have to make peace. I don't know how y'all can cope with being angry at progress all the time. It's not going to stop for you. It's also really awesome that we live to see this come to pass.
We're living in a good dream.
Presumably you've already listened to every piece of music ever recorded? Otherwise it seems it would be more efficient to do that first than wait for AI to generate it and you chancing upon it.
What do you think are some important differences between machines and humans?
Edit: If you mean machine in a more colloquial sense that's fine. Let us first get clear if we mean machine in that sense or in sense of any physical mechanism.
There isn't that much good electro-swing made by humans, and not much new coming out. One can easily consume it all and want to hear some new tunes in that genre, and maybe AI can help with that.
Music demoted to just background noise is unrelated to the social concept of music, which is so ingrained in our nature that we all can’t escape it. And that to me is also why I agree with OP—AI-generated music is fundamentally treason to our species.
(Assuming the lab didn't license anything fairly.)
The commodification of humanity predates human history. It may be a negative trend that alienates us from each other and from the products of our labor, but it is truly ancient.
And as everyone knows, some commodification of some thing means we must go ahead and totally commodify all the things.
Record companies can sell it and don't have to pay any royalties. They only pay the artists pennies as it is, but that's too much for them.
AI "music" has the same issues as electronic music but worse: because it's trying to imitate humans rather than be its own thing like electronic music, it's not only emotionally unavailable but also creepy. Can you imagine listening to an AI "musician" laughing, for instance? It makes my skin crawl even thinking about it.
Strong disagree on "most"; most people listen to music simply because it sounds good. For that, AI serves the purpose very well.
Someone will surely attempt some kind of end-run around this, perhaps through ToS alterations at the service you obtain the music from, but it's undoubtedly a problem for the labels. In the meantime they have a strong incentive to keep human creativity in the loop.
To me the anti-AI crowd is looking at this through the wrong lens, it's now possible to generate an infinite library of music that isn't copyrighted, and can be freely shared, some of which is quite good. There is a pathway all the way from conception to mass distribution that doesn't require the major labels. Whatever else happens that seems like a silver lining at least.
Many YouTube channels started using AI music because they were getting sick of copyright strikes, and I agree some of it is actually very good.
artists complaining about not making enough is like programmers complaining their 7 star repo on github isn't making them enough on ko-fi
I mean my github is like that but I wouldn't expect to live off it unless I was Evan You
You train an AI on that, in order to create something that combines all of the best parts that you want. If anything, I think AI music is the natural progression of innate human desire to leverage and "stand on the shoulders of giants" to create something bigger from smaller pieces.
We are fine with mass-producing wallpaper with machines. People buy this every day, no problem.
We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
Both hang on the wall as decoration. Essentially the same purpose. But we have very different feelings about them and hold them to very different standards.
Music is the same. We have muzak - background music that isn't supposed to be listened to, it's just wallpaper. I don't think many people object to this being machine-made in bulk. And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly. We hold this to a higher standard and expect it to be the product of human creative urges.
Sure “we” are; we just call them “prints” or “posters” instead of ”paintings”.
“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.”
Uhh... Cheap, basically AI generated art for home decor definitely exists.
> And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly
Just like how most people are not sommeliers, most people just listen to pop music "slop"
China is full of factories where exactly this is being done and people are fine with this.
The cynical would dismiss the whole distinction between mass produced and unique art as arbitrary. Or worse, just as a racket to create artificial scarcity, a social kabuki show to create the pretension of high culture, or for the purpose of some sort of criminal scheme like money laundering.
With music... if there's a style you like, no matter how eclectic, there are probably thousands matching human-recorded tracks you can listen to today.
AI will only sing songs that other people like, so AI singers will naturally attract more listeners.
The reasons I don't do music full time are purely economic ones, far from wanting to 'free up' my time to do other things with AI music I'd rather have more of my time occupied by working on music. I want AI to automate the things I don't want to do, I want it to automate the mindless drudgery that is required to exist in a society. Automating art so that I have more time to work is a philistine position in my view, and one which reveals a somewhat dystopian vision of humanity's relationship with both art and work.
Not that you're wrong, but human creativity doesn't mean what it used to.
I sure do love the dying thrashes of human-creativity chauvanists. AI art, AI video, and AI music will eclipse most humans and there is absolutely nothing that will stop it. And you will use it and appreciate it more too. Once you open your eyes that is.
It’s an even more uncomfortable truth: your average Joe cannot tell the difference between human made music or AI generations, just as they also really think that that 8 year old African boy with a huge beard and no hands built a helicopter out of old bottles, or that that cat walked into a hairdresser wearing a suit and had its whiskers curled.
So there’s no argument for it apart from “people will buy the product because they can’t tell that it isn’t real”.
I mean, I'm a professional musician - not sure if that gives me more credibility or less - but I don't feel slighted by folks listening to music made by others (whether those others are other humans, or birds, or whales, or AI).
As you point out, music has an infinite edge; one can spend a lifetime exploring either its niches or its closures and still have an infinity of each to continue discovering.
As moat identification goes, I do feel slightly secure in the sense that AI music (and the information age generally) seems to stoke a hunger for dirty traditionals played well on thick steel strings, and it's going to be a minute before robots can pick 'em like we can.
Or vaporwave's inverse, nightcore, which typically boils down to ”take song, increase bass, speed up”.
First, perhaps the models are trained on relatively low-bitrate encodings. Just like image generations sometimes generate JPG artifacts, we could be hearing the known high-frequency loss of low data rate encodings. Another idea is that 'S' and 'T' sounds and similar are relatively broad-spectrum sounds. Not unlike white noise. That kind of sound is known to be difficult to encode for lossy frequency-domain encoding schemes. Perhaps these models work in a similar domain and are subject to similar constraints. Perhaps there's a balance here of low-pass filter vs. "warbly" sounds, and we're hearing a middle ground compromise.
I don't know how it happens, but when I hear the "AI" sound in music, this is usually one of the first tells.
Basically made with pirated mp3s
It is semi niche, but I did some ballpark math, and about 72 sales rapidly would put him in the top spot for that niche.
That number sounds about right when he’s mentioned the gross $ sales of his book.
I gradually went from various genres -> mostly nerdcore -> mostly AI nerdcore.
https://www.last.fm/user/testycool/library/tracks?from=2025-...
EDIT: Updated link to the most listened songs in the past 180 days. The songs are not generated by me.
I do sometimes turn on ambient noise, some of it is randomized and musical (like '88 keys' at mynoise.net). Not AI, just algorithmic, but just because there's no human composer doesn't mean it MUST be condemned.
It's aleatoric music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music
Also I tend to listen to songs for a few days, during which time I feel they're the best thing ever, which also helps with momentum during work.
After a few days I have to find other songs. Since AI music started getting more traction it's been way easier to find great songs.
I understand the criticisms of AI music, but that doesn't take away from the fact that for me and a growing number of people it sounds good.
AI music is just as good as all human-made music. It is at the point of indistinguishability now and anyone actually using suno v5+ knows this.
various genres: https://suno.com/s/Oc5842XzzuBTk4Ma https://suno.com/s/RdmFOKpbi4zyVbRf https://suno.com/s/J4Z8t8jU9JXVJ1DB https://suno.com/s/OhfzCYkmcZhFf1Pk https://suno.com/s/VYHHLW7Hkw2uHjrb https://suno.com/s/cTu7AkoOdAyi0eWz https://suno.com/s/QvOExImOVzo1b2Gl https://suno.com/s/MASINon9lGr9JPLS https://suno.com/s/ujpTfZwVdAKy9W0h https://suno.com/s/DwekDLuEzgyNpYGQ https://suno.com/s/psWqWzDQa6Aq96Pk https://suno.com/s/JEM8G2RxD35ZUpGy
also if you like enders game lol: https://suno.com/s/gQ8eGNgnkfktl0Xq
Also I am not listening to AI generated music that I generate myself.
These are some channels whose music I like:
- https://www.youtube.com/@EndlessTaverns
- https://www.youtube.com/@TheAutomaticSingermy music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
You just described 90% of young country for decades now. I keep waiting for its fans to get tired of being pandered to with formulaic lyrics, but they seem to be an endless well.
Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.
The lyrics of the one you linked are fairly strong compared to other songs on the top 100 list.
Even though they'd be right? Interesting.
i agree. as far as ai slop goes, it's pretty good. it could be made by a human who wasn't very artistic. i'm not saying it's obviously AI generated, just that it's not very good music. but that's not because i dislike popular music - i think most of the hot 100 is usually pretty good, and contains significant artistic value even if it isn't to my taste.
if somebody was claiming this was created by a human, i'd believe them but i'd have the same objection: this isn't going to hit 11 positions on the itunes music chart without gaming the chart in some way.
"ai generated music creator manipulates the itunes chart to occupy 11 positions" is a much less interesting story than "ai generated music is so popular it occupies 11 spots on the itunes charts"
Soulless and devoid of emotion, or an inspired end run about the minor issue of a (self confessed) inability to conventionly sing.
It's fine precisely because it provokes emotion that AI stuff doesn't. You may love or hate what the Flying Lizards did, but it's very memorable and you will have an opinion about it (My wife loves it; I think it's stupid--C'est la vie.)
The AI generated music just sounds like every other average artist. I'm definitely not even convinced it's AI. It could very well be somebody claiming "AI" in order to game the system or get people talking about it.
As for occupying iTunes spots, why not? Is there much difference between Max Martin and his ilk shitting out yet more generic glop or AI doing it?
I feel much the same about a lot of the early AI music I've heard, I have a couple of channels on a lesser rank of RSS notifications but more and more there's less and less that's remarkable and it's feeling like the worst kinds of elevator music .. you know, not the Brian Eno stuff . . .
So yeah, we're sitting about like two Yorkshiremen giving a real Thomas Beecham "Shostakovich? I think I stepped in some once" vibe here. Probably deservedly.
It sounds like AI.
> I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
Why are you getting offended on behalf of a computer? Or is there a deeper reasoning for this logic?
Which says all you need to know about where all this is headed, I guess.
But that's a relatively easy thing for a human with the right combination of toolchain, ears, and experience to fix. It tends to be a slow process that takes a good bit of time, but lots of actual-mixdowns start off way worse than this before they get polished up by a skilled mastering engineer.
(Maybe in a year or three we'll have the mastering process automated into an uncanny mush of soullessness, as well.)
https://github.com/sergree/matchering
(I haven't actually tried this, I just watched the linked Benn Jordan video.)
IMO, the ideal would be for all music to be supplied unmastered so the listener's playback software can apply this process to their own taste. Mastering is necessary for listening with garbage playback equipment (e.g. phone speakers) or noisy listening environments (e.g. cars, parties), but it makes things sound worse in good conditions. The best sounding music CDs I own are classical CDs on Telarc that have liner notes bragging about the complete lack of mastering.
Eh? I listened to it on quite good nearfield gear, in a decent room, and the AI track linked above still sounds like it needs a good bit of help from a responsible adult to bring it up on this rig. :)
Good mastering helps everywhere -- on all systems. For instance: The sound of Steely Dan is pretty good on playback with about anything, I think, and that sound took a ton of work.
And while classical music is not my first preference, I do love me a good Telarc recording. I strongly suspect that the signal path that they use isn't necessarily quite as pure as they insist that it is. Everything is a tone control, including a microphone -- and money is money. They're not going to reschedule an orchestra to fix an untoward blip at 3KHz. They'll just fix it in post (hopefully, as minimally as possible) and send it.
But otherwise, I agree. The mastering process can be automated. Ultimately, it will be. And for sure, it will also be a customizable user preference.
Some of that work has already been in the bag for decades. Ford, for instance, has been using DSPs in their factory car audio systems to shape sounds in unconventional ways for over 30 years. This gives them a lot of knobs to turn, and to fix into constraints, to help shape a listener's chosen music to sound as good as it can on less-than-ideal built-down-to-price on-road audio systems.
Or at least: It sounds as good it can to a consensus of engineers, or of a focus group.
But the knobs exist. And they don't have to be fixed or constrained: They can (and will) be automatically twisted to suit a listener's preferences.
I'll try to make time to check out your link in a day or two.
Wherever there is profit to be made on the internet, you have massive amounts of weird abuse and botting to game the system. Maybe not even literal bots, but paying a sweatshop in India to leave thousands of generic comments to boost your rankings on the algorithm.
It was noise when it was only people; it's still just noise when it also includes bots.
To me, this present-day noise is indistinguishable from the pre-bot noise. It's the same noise, in that both things are just noise of that shape. "How beautiful!" "I really feel this one!" "I love this song!"
Sometimes, the signal-to-noise ratio is better. Sometimes it's pretty bad. It always has been this way in online discourse -- especially with things that appeal to old folks.
In a track where the protagonist primarily complains about feeling old, it makes sense that most of the comments are that of what old folks have always written online.
(Are these particular comments primarily bot spam? Maybe. I peered into the depths a bit, and accounts for the top comments I looked at had been around for years. That isn't evidence for or against a well-orchestrated long con, but orchestration is hard and people who write insipid comments are plentiful.)
If you go on soundcloud/spotify/etc there is infinite EDM slop that isn’t worth listening to. But if you listen to real event recordings on YouTube, they are all playing mostly the same stuff by actual artists with new/unreleased music that people get hyped to hear since you can’t find it anywhere else.