A while back, I made a rather fatalistic prediction: that barring a radical intervention, in a decade or two, most of exchanges on the internet will be faked. It’s not pessimism; it’s that our aggregate capacity for human-to-human interactions is inherently capped. In contrast, the ability to generate human-like text, images, and audio is now almost infinitely scalable — and from customer support, to marketing, to cybercrime, there are powerful incentives to crank it up to eleven.
The most popular article on this blog is still my 2022 entry about a machine-generated book I accidentally bought on Amazon. I made the discovery before the release of ChatGPT; since then, machine-generated books, articles, and imagery have swarmed the web. If you want to find real photos on Google Images, the before:2022-01-01 operator is a godsend.
A phenomenon that has gotten much less attention is generative music; machine-generated songs can be created on platforms such as Suno, possibly from nothing more than a single-sentence prompt outlining the desired style and lyrical themes. As with generated images, the technology is impressive; the results are not quite there, but if it’s just playing in the background, you will probably miss the cues.
And so, it was only a matter of time before this band started automatically playing for me on Spotify in the platform’s personalized “release radar” lineup:
Embark on a journey… to hell.
“Huh”, I thought to myself. This is some seriously bland, autotuned symphonic metal. And what’s up with that ultra-generic description and an AI-quality cover image?
My suspicions aroused, I went to the band’s YouTube profile — 4.4k subscribers! — and discovered a series of videos consisting almost exclusively of stock footage and AI-generated images:
Old Gods of Atlantis, save me.
The vocals sounded inconsistent, the lyrics had a serious CountryLyricsBot 2000 vibe, and the appearance of a woman who I presumed was the lead singer changed from clip to clip.
At that point, I posted an exasperated rant on Mastodon; a reader by the name of @moirearty quickly uncovered this remark from under one of the early clips:
It’s only magic when you don’t know how it’s done.
Credit where credit is due: the author explained what’s going on when asked, and included a passing mention of AI in the below-the-fold summary on Spotify. Still, surreptitious non-human music is here — and it probably monetizes your senses more scalably and more effortlessly than before.