I fell victim to AI slop
Initially created on
How I got scammed into buying AI slop
A few months ago, my best friend recommended me a new artist he had stumbled upon. We both love metal music and he knows exactly what excites me, progressive, djenty technical riffs well executed with great sound design. This new band hit all the right boxes. I instantly was drawn to most of their songs from their recent album. This does not happen often.
Since I found Qobuz, an easy way to legally purchase and download high-quality music files, naturally I went there and bought almost every album and single that I could find from that said band. Since this was a direct recommendation and Qobuz having a strict AI safety policy, I didn’t give it a second thought.
Doubts
Listening more thoroughly, I noticed a few things being off. Once the defining characteristic the singer displayed and I loved, a blend of front singers of I Prevail, Issues, Adam Gontier and in a few songs even being able to scream as controlled as Dance Gavin Dance’s Jon Mess hard vocals, it hit me. This might be an AI generated album.
Within a brief search session, I was able to expose this “artist” as AI slop. No pictures or concerts of that band that I could find. They seemingly popped up recently and were able to pump out a large amount in a short period of time.
In retrospect, connecting the dots is always easy. Some riffs were technically challenging and I even tried to make sense of how they must have played it. Of course I couldn’t. Usually not paying much attention to lyrics, but as this music resonated so well with me, this time I wanted to sing along. As often, lyrics were a bit muddle-headed. The drummer flew over toms effortlessly and fast which by themselves seemed to float in space. But this could still be the sign of a very skilled drummer and a sound engineer taking a few knobs too far.
Realization
I felt so dumb. My parents in their 60ies, sure, they fall victim to AI slop, but not I, someone with a fundamental understanding of how these models function and someone who works in machine learning.
In this moment of realization, the joyful time spent listening to this music was tarnished. This instant cognitive discrepancy is painful.
My friend apologized for his recommendation, but in the same breath argued, what’s the harm if listening to it gives me that much joy? My stance on AI is worth its own note, but in this case, my reservations come from the fact that a) this “music” is actually a huge collaborative mesh up (I like the description of LLMs for example as huge collaboration tools) of thousands of real musicians work who won’t get credit for it b) as of now to generate such content vast amounts of energy and water are necessary c) music has many more dimensions than pure hedonism and consumerism, yes it brings joy and revenue, but reducing an art form to only these dimensions doesn’t give it full credit.
Qobuz’ Response
Qobuz responded well. I can highly recommend them. After a bit of painful time consuming search for their support email address – for anyone looking for it, it’s support-help@qobuz.com (see also my Mastodon post in the hope that interlinking will incentivize search engines to pick it up.) – they responded fast and well.
They instantly refunded my purchases and involved their catalogue team to investigate. After just a few days Qobuz came back to me confirming it was all AI generated. The artist has since then been blacklisted.
Furthermore, Qobuz mentioned, they will be rolling out a new AI detection tool in the coming weeks as a response to more and more AI generated content trying to make its way onto the platform, scamming listeners and depriving other artists for their hard earned money.
I want to thank the Qobuz support team for their quick and competent response. Companies like these give me hope that a new wave of conscious human-first companies emerge out of the current enshittification trends.
Learnings
AI music is short-term fun with perfectly timed hooks. It brings joy to the shallow listener, including myself. But luckily, it still can’t stand the test of a careful listen. It lacks congruence and a certain novelty, perhaps we can call this “the human element”.
Generative AI destroys trust. Two fail-safes broke, personal recommendation and professional scrutiny.
Afterword
And what was the artist in question, you ask? Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? And I certainly don’t want to endorse this scam by giving it a platform. But for anyone wondering, the “artist” Serinx is AI generated slop to scam people into paying for it.
And lastly, go buy music from real humans on Qobuz. If you need help, a human will respond at support-help@qobuz.com.
