[chromacity]

Honestly, debating these corner cases feels like a distraction tactic. The reality is that the bulk of that 44% is total AI slop: one-sentence prompts entered into Suno to generate 1,000 tracks and extract money from subscribers who stream in the background.

It's the same thing with writing. No one cares that you asked a chatbot to help you reword a paragraph in your essay. The problem is zero-effort slop delivered by the truckload to your social media feed.

[harrall]

It’s not a corner case when you have to enforce it.

Someone will end up in the middle and then you’ll be responsible for accepting or rejecting it.

The bulk is obvious but the debate isn’t for the obvious.

[chromacity]

But it doesn't. We have a problem. We can focus on addressing the problem without pre-adjudicating every hypothetical corner case.

If your "work" is mostly AI, and if you don't disclose it, it goes to /dev/null. And yeah, you can get into a debate that it's unfair to reject 51% but allow 49%, but that's how the real world works - otherwise, nothing would ever get done. You also get a DUI for BAC of 0.08% but not 0.07%. That's not an argument for putting DUI laws on hold until we can figure out a more perfect approach.

[saaaaaam]

What is “mostly” AI in the context of music?

[Ajedi32]

Of course ~nobody wants low-effort "I pasted a one-line prompt into Suno and got this out" in their feed. If they did they'd be listening on Suno and not Spotify. The problem is there's no objective, let alone automated, way to tell the difference between that and the corner cases. Artistic quality is an inherently subjective metric, not something that can be enforced via rules.

[somewhatgoated]

Who is listening to that crap anyway when you got literal decades worth of great music to choose from?

[pavel_lishin]

New great music is being released every day. What should I do, arbitrary decide to never consume any music made past today?

[somewhatgoated]

Nah but I venture that you could distinguish AI generated music from great new music. And if you can’t, what’s the issue?

[chromacity]

The same people who read AI-generated stories about AI. Which is, roughly, most of us. There are AI-generated blog posts on the front page of HN multiple times a day. Right now, I see "I prompted ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini and watched my Nginx logs", which is AI slop. I'm sure there's more.

[wartywhoa23]

Well, even if you are absolutely deliberate against AI slop like me, you might well just fall asleep listening to an ambient album of your top rated human musician, and wake up to AI slop anyway in an hour or two in which your subscription money had been paying those fuckers' instant ramen.

But this can be easily fixed by turning the autoplay, the slop's best friend, off.

Me personally, I sniff AI on Spotify by empty "about" sections. Which is sad as I always held dear that it's the music that must speak for the author, not the vice versa.

[somewhatgoated]

The solution is easy, don’t use Spotify. They are money grubbing vampires leeching off musicians anyway and using your subscription money to fund shady arms companies.

[saaaaaam]

Lots of people are listening to it. There’s an AI brand named “Eddie Dalton” on Spotify right now with 589k monthly listeners and a couple of million streams on its top track. This is one of many.

Lots of people don’t care about whether the music they listen to is human created or not - just as lots of people don’t care about lots of other AI slop so long as they are entertained by it.

[somewhatgoated]

If they don’t care what is the problem?

The biggest issue for new musicians is not AI generated slop, it’s a predatory industry and a backlog of 80+ years of excellent music.

[saaaaaam]

The biggest issue for new musicians is getting people’s attention. AI music that people are happy to over human music listen to is absolutely part of the problem.

[somewhatgoated]

I agree that this is the biggest problem, but the existing backlog of hits is far that have been recorded since way before I was born is far “worse” in that regard than AI slop.

It’s easy (at least for now) to compete with slop - it’s way harder to compete with e.g. Queen, Eminem and the Beatles.

It’s like saying cancer is a problem when you’re bleeding from a gunshot wound to your chest.

[saaaaaam]

The engagement mechanisms and audiences for heritage artists vs new artists are very different. New artists are not in competition with heritage artists like the ones you mention: those artists are a constant passive consumption baseline against which new active “lean in” consumption needs to fit. A lot of music listening is passive consumption. Start an algorithmically generated “radio” style playlist from one of those big name heritage artists and Spotify will then serve up payola content (baked in in the major label deals, “Spotify Discovery Mode” for indies) that positions new music within that playlist for algorithmically receptive listeners. If AI created music is going head to head in that algorithmic market for listening slots, that has a significant disadvantage for new human-created music.

Big name heritage artists aren’t the problem - they are the thing that underpins a lot of consumption and keeps people coming back to platform.

[saaaaaam]

I can assure you it’s not a corner case: this is one of the things that a lot of creators are concerned about. If a major streaming platform decides your music is not acceptable because you used some AI as part of your production process and blocks your song as a result that has pretty big consequences.

Spotify, for example, already said that any track that gets under 1000 streams will not get any money. What if it says “any track that uses more than a proportion of AI will not make any money” - but refuses to say how it makes those decisions so that people can’t game the system.

[ctoth]

If... If you're pulling from something called a feed ... Are you really surprised to get slop in it?

[Kye]

You're thinking of a feed trough, like for pigs. This use of feed comes from news services.