You may have seen “AI slop” on your social media timeline: AI-generated images of extreme, eye-catching, emotionally-laden topics like emaciated poor people, natural disasters, crying children, and outlandish religious or military images. (This X/Twitter feed rounds up the most absurd – and sometimes slightly-NSFW – examples). But why is such obviously-fake imagery there in the first place and why aren’t platforms removing it? According to this 404 Media article, it’s simple: because social media platforms pay bonuses for posts that get extra engagement; and enterprising people are finding a financial opportunity in generating thousands of engagement-bait images. OK, so what: the internet has been awash with dreck since forever, right? Well, yes, except now this dreck can be made en masse in seconds, and fine-tuned to trigger deep emotional responses – and a tap of the “like” button – before rational thinking can kick in.
We spoke to author and activist Cory Doctorow recently about “enshittification” of the internet – a theory that says the rush for increased profits means a watering-down of quality and user experience. So how does this connect to music? Here’s one way: at the moment, the music industry is extremely reliant on social media platforms to capture engagement for its human-made music. And these platforms are designed to instantly grab attention with a one-two punch of sound and images. So creator-users who are intent on maximising engagement might find that music from an AI creation tool is, similar to those “slop” images, preferable to finding a human-made song, at least when it comes to song snippets very specifically designed to grab users’ ears.
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