AI Slop is taking over Spotify

This week I’ve had the unfortunate displeasure of witnessing the first wave of AI Slop music in my “Discover Weekly” on Spotify.

Not only was the music not in line with my usual type of recommendations, I got hit with triple slop in the same playlist.

There’s something so visceral about the anger I felt when I realized it shortly after the first song started playing. I don’t know whether it’s because music is much older and deeper in the human psyche compared to photography or video or if it’s just my personal relationship to it that differs. In either case, I apologize to anyone who was offended by AI image and video generation and whom I didn’t empathize with enough before.

When it comes to AI image or video generation, it seemed to me like it would go the way it always does, meaning talented people who do this for a living would simply have another tool available to them to produce work that’s beyond anything I can do. Maybe the gap decreases slightly at first but creative people find ways of being creative, they’ll keep innovating no matter the tooling.

But for AI music generation it seems to me like a completely different situation. There is no intermediary step in which something is produced to help towards an end result, the first output is the final output. Music and lyrics in one bundle, ready to be shipped into Spotify’s eager claws.

Spotify has a huge incentive to let AI Slop music proliferate, even more so to produce it themselves and avoid paying real artists the little they’ve been paying them already.

If it can be policed/detected by Spotify, then give us a toggle to disable all AI music from ever reaching our ears. Realistically, they won’t be able to (or won’t want to) prevent this from happening at scale and our only refuge will be to go back to our self-hosted and curated libraries.

AI music isn’t music and I fucking hate it.