Musicians – It’s Time to End AI Slop
If you make music, then know this;
Artificial Intelligence is robbing you.
Or rather, the firms behind this so-called “game changing” tech have already robbed you.
If it’s anywhere online, your work has been scraped, copied, mimicked, mocked, and regurgitated by a machine that can’t even hear music.
And the slop it’s churning out is… oh no. It’s actually… good*.
But this isn’t AI doing all the work. This is not a new artificial species with the intelligence and emotion and experience to create works of art.
This is the work of people, who’ve honed their craft over lifetimes, having their work copied and amalgamated into what an algorithm believes will fulfill the prompt it was given. It’s the work of people, who’ve built, modelled, and trained the AI.
It’s all still people.
And we all, as people, still have the power to make this work for the greater good. But how? *It’s only good today – AI will always be behind the cultural curve.
AI isn’t going anywhere
Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek – and the AI music from Udio and Suno – it’s only going to get more and more funding. It’ll only get better at mimicking popular styles, popular artists, and popular songs.
Will it one day create a universally lauded masterpiece? Or win a Grammy? Or take to a stage and perform?
Who knows.
But one thing’s for sure; Pandora’s box is well and truly open. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We can’t uncrack the egg. We can’t make this paragraph sound any more AI-generated (maybe a couple of em dashes will sort that out!).
We, as musicians, creatives, PR pros, and media people – we have to navigate this new world, where music is created at the push of a button. Music that would easily slot into a movie, TV show, social media post, or Spotify playlist.
How do we live with it? Can we still make any kind of money? Can we fight it?
Enacting digital disobedience
Watch this, right now. Drop everything (including reading this article) and watch it.
If this hasn’t convinced you that we need regulation, and that copyright laws need to protect IP owners, and that AI companies need to be requesting permission (and paying for) the work they’ve trained their machines on… What will?
We need to fight for our intellectual property.
For our creativity.
For our livelihoods.
For our creative souls.
We are in a post-truth era, where video evidence means nothing, where the written word means nothing, and where music means nothing.
But we are not powerless.
Reject the cookies. Mess up the CAPTCHA. Do not accept the terms and conditions.
Disobey and disregard the digital gods. If they can serve you half truths, you can serve them, too.
Fight for copyright protection, fair licensing, and automatic opt-out of AI training. Sign petitions like this one. Don‘t cave in.
We don’t necessarily always have to be on the backfoot, either.
We can actively fight against AI training, by sabotaging it.
Benn Jordan’s AI poison
Benn Jordan, AKA The Flashbulb, is an independent electronic music artist who’s been writing, releasing, and performing for 20 years.
His work has fallen afoul of AI trainers, and he’s felt so powerless that he stopped releasing any new works.
Until now. Benn has developed “adversarial music” in collaboration with a team of developers, which can play sounds that humans understand – but is total nonsense to machines.
Or… It can be used to actively hack devices like Amazon Echos running Alexa, or iPhones running Siri, as his video demonstrates.
By encoding music files with “adversarial noise”, AI models quickly stop being able to improve, and their datasets become corrupted.
If this sounds like illegal activity, then know this; if any AI firm tried to claim damages based on adversarial noise, they would immediately implicate themselves in the biggest copyright infringement case of all time, and put themselves on the hook for reparations to every single creator whose work they stole.
Still, the tech isn’t perfect, and it’s a long way from becoming something you can simply add on to your library. And for every weapon in the fight against AI slop, there’s a shield.
Should we give up hope, and just stop creating?
There’s one more thing we can hope for
No – we shouldn’t stop expressing ourselves and telling our stories, just because a handful of tech bros have figured out, for the first time in their lives, how to create something (and they had to steal IP for it to be any good in the first place).
We can hope that most people who listen to music still want to go to live shows, and hear music plucked from thin air. We can hope that the tide will turn against slop, and that authenticity will matter more than ever.
We can hope that the human experience pushes artists to innovate beyond the limited experience that AI has. We can hope that our sense of humour, our rebellious nature, and our sheer will to survive will save the day.
We can hope that talent continues to be discovered.
We are valuable. We have meaning. And humans will continue to connect with each other in a deep, valuable, meaningful way.
It’s inevitable that one day, a machine will love, laugh, and live. But until then, anything it creates is as hackneyed and mockable as that very phrase; unoriginal, rehashed, abandoned by its original owner.
The second art becomes a commodity, it stops being art – and becomes something to subvert and tear down. Something to defy and rebel against.
And so, Rebels – keep rebelling. It’s your duty. And music depends on it.
Urban Rebel – pop music PR
Urban Rebel does pop music PR for the most exciting emerging talent and established acts. Contact us: call +44 (0) 161 298 6650 or send your message to [email protected].