alt Hacker NewsAuto play has been a way for me to find new music. I stopped using it because now every listen is accompanied by a a nagging feeling that the song that is playing might be AI generated.
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.
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If the artists have live shows, it's generally a good indication it's not AI (for now at least).
I've fallen off it a while ago to be honest, AI generated stuff aside, Spotify has only been recommending me really unknown / obscure artists for ages now of debatable quality.
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.
I get that feeling in Lidl. Their ambient music used to be somewhat identifiable, now it just seems a bit off.
This is a seed of OCD. Don't let it grow or it can ruin everything.
I'm sorry but this attitude baffles me, and I think it's the sort of thing that will sound so silly in 20 years that we'll have collectively memory-holed it. If you're turned off from listening to Spotify recoms becausue they _might_ be AI and you _might_ not know, what does that say to you about the disconnect between your aesthetic judgment and your values?
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.
Racist! If the song is good, why should I care if its created by AI or a human? I think this shows the beginning of racism towards AI and I am ashamed of the human race.