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.
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…
To be fair, you could say the same thing about at least a few pre-AI pop songs.
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.
That's like asking HN if they buy Christmas CDs at Tesco. This is a very self-selecting group of people. I know people who buy off of iTunes, who don't use Spotify, who've never heard of Bandcamp, who still listen to the radio… there are people beyond your little bubble. It's a big old world.
My wife rolls her eyes at me and my iPod
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_%3F!*%40_Like_a_Suicide
I suspect it's an issue with too big and diverse of a dataset, listening history going back years and tens of thousands of songs.
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.
But then they sell the mp3 albums at $15, more than the physical version ever was. Come on, there has to be a middle ground. At $5 each I'll buy 20, at $15 maybe 1
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.
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).
I understand the distinction, but I don’t find the examples compelling. The difference between the popcorn and tomato meters, as I understand it, is just the source. The latter are critics’ opinions while the former are “regular people” opinions. Professional critics may have some concern for the artistic value of a movie, but their job is to help you decide “should you spend your time with this” and the entertainment value is a primary consideration. Furthermore, a critic can have early access and needs to write their review fast. An audience member, who has no such obligation, can let it ruminate and have their opinions evolve. In that sense, a critic’s opinion may be more influenced by initial appeal.
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 diet, 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.
Yes, obviously. It’s almost a perfect demonstration of that.
Halfway through this paragraph I started hearing it in the Trump cadence.
> The source matters, both for meat and art.
Yes, exactly. This is why people care about things like DOC, fair trade certifications, UFLPA clothing, cruelty-free cosmetics, and so on.
To deepen the analogy slightly: is the AI "ethically acquired"? Do the people collating the training data have consent for every piece of music they trained it on?
It implies to trust the algorithm and believe that Spotify developer, first know what they're doing, secondly have your best interest at heart.
I don't believe neither, I don't use their algorithm.
A piece of art is not a self-contained thing, the end result isn't where all (or even most) of the interest resides. The intent of the artist, the point they're making, the history that led to it, the references it makes and why, the choices and decisions taken in making it... that's all inherent part of the art and a huge part of why people might enjoy a piece of art or not.
For example, if I listen to some progressive rock, I might enjoy it for how a fellow human managed to identify and break some rules of traditional songwriting, for their expertise in musical theory, for the references they chose to make to other bands/songs/genres... If I learn it's AI-generated, the song itself hasn't changed but there's no point in it anymore, my enjoyment was directly coming from the fact that it was made by a human: if it's a machine I'll just shrug and say "yeah sure everyone knows machines can do that". Entire genres like punk or grunge make zero sense if not human-made.
For a more extreme example: a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece. If a piece is AI-generated, there's literally zero interest in it (except maybe as commentary on AI itself, fine).
> 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
I suggest being a lot more humble about your understanding of art and other people's relationship to it
> a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece.
I personally find no enjoyment in art where I have to have context for it to be "interesting". Either it is or it isn't interesting on it's own merits. I find all art the same though. If it isn't interesting on it's own, then it's not interesting on the whole (for me).
Really this stuff is accelerating a conflict between two philosophies of life:
- one where neural network A (electric) produces a set of stimuli for neural network B (meat), which in turn causes the meat to press buttons to maximize the stimuli received;
- one where humans seek meaning in the world and connection with other humans.
Now, the second is losing, and has been since the decline in philosophical dualism across the 20th century; but it can still express the concepts of "important" and "meaningful", which have no place in the first worldview at all.
> The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter
More plainly, as soon as I read the headline about one AI occupying 11 top slots I thought it was obviously being gamed by listen-botting. I don't really know how a system where machines "listen" to other machines in order to extract a small revenue from defrauded advertisers is sustainable, but there it is.
What an awful take. Music is inherently a human act, there's been lots written about this, but the point, and especially for music with lyrics is story telling, emotion, connection, empathy. Things a duck or slug or large language model have not business mimicking.
There is nothing wrong with your approach to music appreciation (removing the author entirely and appreciating it as an isolated work), but it's worth recognizing that a lot of people have different values from you here and their preferred mode of music appreciation is equally valid.
"Who cares if that 'I love you' voicemail is really from your mother. As long as it sounds like your mother, it should give you the same warm feeling."
I can’t enjoy listening to music I know was made by AI. If you can, power to you.