There's something grimly satisfying about the news that Spotify has deemed it necessary to relegate AI generated music to its own corner of the platform. From September, the streaming service has announced it will start labelling some profiles as 'AI Personas' and keeping them out of users' recommendation feeds.
It's good news that Spotify wants to tackle the epidemic of AI content on its platform. But it also looks like a crystal clear admission by a big tech brand that something has gone wrong, and we're surrounded by slop.
Spotify recently announced that it has removed 75 million spammy tracks. Deezer has shared the alarming statistic that more than half of the tracks uploaded to its service every day are AI generated. The proliferation of AI slop isn't some distant problem; it's happening now, and you might be listening to it without even realising it. Those lo-fi beats you're working to? Who knows who made them, and whether it was a person at all.
Nobody asked for this. Users didn't wake up one morning demanding an endless supply of synthetic artists with suspiciously polished album covers and just as suspiciously polished beats. And real artists certainly didn't ask to be buried beneath a bunch of algorithmically produced background noise. We've gone so far as to say AI is killing music, with fake bands like The Velvet Sundown drowning the platform with crisp yet somehow dead-behind-the-eyes soundscapes.
It's the platforms that allowed it to happen. Today's media platforms and social media reward quantity and novelty. They embraced the shiny new thing, AI, and now they're having to clean up the mess.
Spotify isn't alone. YouTube has recently tightened its approach to low quality AI content by demonetising accounts. LinkedIn is letting users report posts they think are AI. It's encouraging that the tide seems to be turning, with badges and filters naming, shaming and, most importantly, hiding artificially generated content.
But this feels very much like a problem of big tech's own making. Both AI and streaming promise infinite content. Combining the two is a recipe for infinite slop.
