The flood of AI music on their platform is becuase people can make money off it. If you turn off that faucet you stop the flooding.
The flood of AI music on their platform is becuase people can make money off it. If you turn off that faucet you stop the flooding.
And the flood really is overwhelming. This weekend my mom was complaining about having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle Unlimited. I mentioned that the relative lack of slop is one of the major reasons I chose Kobo over Kindle. Even before this latest AI boom I was already starting to view less content as a feature, not a bug, because it seems that on subscription services “more” is increasingly just a polite way of saying “more crap.”
Similar feelings about Nebula vs YouTube, although Nebula straight up doesn’t have entire genres, or videos in languages other than English, so it doesn’t really work as a general recommendation.
I really wanted to like Kobo but the no refunds policy really burned me. I bought a book listed as being in English, with an English title and English on the cover page, but the contents were entirely in French and they wouldn't refund it because of the general no refund policy. I just felt ripped off because what I bought, as advertised, just wasn't what I received.
That would be illegal in Australia, even if the policy was prominently displayed up front.
Claiming otherwise is to treat each book as a packet of Pokémon trading cards, where you know you’re getting some cards, but you don’t get to choose which ones.
I don't follow this rule strictly, but for most of my adult life I've limited most of my book reading to books > 10 years old. If it still seems remotely relevant and worth reading ten years later, it is far less likely to be a waste of my time. Now sure I'm a bit less prepared for water cooler conversations, but overall the policy has served me well.
> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle
because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.
> reading to books > 10 years old
I've found myself applying this rule, sometimes unintentionally, to almost all media I consume. It's now a very rare occasion that there's something new that I want to read, watch, or listen to. It just isn't that good, tbh. My music library is full of music from ~2018 and older, most books I enjoy are even older than that, and I can't remember the last time a movie came out that I was dying to see since about 2016-ish.
It's not like I'm intentionally filtering out for old stuff, my own tastes just seem to prefer it. Not sure if its due to my own age (I'm not that old, mid thirties), or if we've just so over optimized media for revenue extraction that its become too formulaic and boring.
A significant amount of ebook reading now is romance/erotica or fantasy (or combined "romantasy") genres by readers for whom something a decade old won't appeal. An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time), or it isn't what one's peers are reading and one wants to connect with a community of other readers online or in school/university, etc.
Obviously if one doesn't read these genres, this is a whole foreign world, but it is increasingly the state of mainstream fiction reading, and AI slop is a problem for them that you may be asked to help avoid if you are the nerdy loved one of such a reader.
> An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time),
Or, you know, you've just read the old books already because they came out 10 years ago and that's a lot of time to read.
I doubt it has anything to do with "romantasy" as a genre, anything that has people actually reading books, on a regular basis (as opposed to the people who mean reading as consuming one "notable" novel a year).
In any case, epublishing has made a lot more books available and filtering through them was a difficult task even before AI increased the output dramatically.
I've been saying for a while now there's a large untapped market for actually effective recommendation systems (almost certainly human driven given the demonstrated limitations of computer systems so far), as mentioned it was a problem to find "the good stuff" even among just self-published pre-ai books, now it's way beyond that.
I guess to some degree it's the same basic problem as spam filtering, but considerably more nuanced and difficult.
I think we underestimate how much of reading happens from the shallow romance section of the bookstores.
It's big business and is really not that deep. For someone who isn't part of that world(which is big business) to judge what is good or not is hard.
And now it's cheap to produce that "pulp romance" novels en masse. So people who have little clue about this genre can produce something that seems good, but doesn't appeal to the reader.
I think the flood is also due to people in general finding AI generated music passable.
I may be in the minority but I like AI generated music. Do you ever really like a song in the current moment and want one almost exactly like that? Mostly for background music. I like to listen to synthwave while working and since I may listen for 10-20h a week, I hear the same songs over and over. Maybe I should be more selective or curate my playlist, but it's just work. I would love a stream of AI generated music in a particular style I can work to.
You see that a lot in AI (and honestly, other discussions) where people with differing requirements are talking past each other.
Some people are listening to music as an experience, internalizing lyrics, empathizing with the feeling and vibes of the artist. Others are just wanting something pop-y as background noise while they do work. They come together and since they're arguing for different needs, the whole thing turns into a mess.
It's still silly. We have decades and decades of pop music, and really any kind of music you could possibly want. What AI SHOULD be used for is matching these people with some of the music made over the course of human history that they might like, not feeding them pig slop.
We have a lot of pop-slop, now it's AI slop.
There's a reason why a few artists persist through the decades, while others just fade into obscurity.(think of how long Madonna, Cher have been around)
AI generated music is good, the singing (vocals and lyrics) is typically very bad.
AI generated music is also not at all original. Which scares all of the "artists" who lack originality.
> AI generated music is good, the singing (vocals and lyrics) is typically very bad.
This is a musicaly illterate position. You only find the instruments passable because you're not familiar enough with music. You hear vocals and because you have a decent understanding of what a human should sound like you can tell how bad it sounds. Anyone with a musical ear hears the same thing of the horrible AI generated instrumentals.
Totally agree with Tidal (music SPAM needs to go away) and this coming from a huge lover of AI music. So much so, I only listen to my own AI music now and I'm not the only one per this Verge article https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/937059/n...
As a lifelong songwriter, using AI to produce my own melodies and lyrics lets me listen to the diary of my own life, which allows me to reminsce and realize my songs are the best songs ever for JUST me :). I dont subject others to them ... much.
Just Carpenter Brut and Gunship alone collectively have over 6 hours of music.
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So why not just disallow it entirely, if that’s the goal?
Because AI music can be still valuable.
People who like to write lyrics, but can't afford to pay a vocalist still deserve to get their art materialized and distributed.
I've encountered AI copies of songs from popular artists, hopefully this will stop or at least slow that down. I suspect the only reason those songs are uploaded is because people will accidentally listen to it and then the up loader gets the streaming revenue.
But that's not a new issue per se, low effort "covers" / "remixes" of songs has been an issue for a long time. Bonus point if said low-effort remix includes the original artist in the artist fields, so it shows up in the recommendations of fans of the original artist for a lot of accidental listens.
But AI does seem to make it easier.
When low effort goes to no effort one can expect the problem to worsen by several orders of magnitude.
Also not that it takes skill to come up with a remix/cover/homage of a song that is close enough to the original that people can enjoy it like the original, but not so close that you are just plagiarizing it. So this problem before AI is limited to talented musicians who for some reason would rather copy somebody else then to make their own music.
It’s really bad on smaller artists that had moderate vitality on TikTok. Or at least it’s easier to spot since they have smaller catalogs. Encountered some on Apple Music the other day that outright had the artist listed and according to Apple it was from the artist.
IMO they need to focus on the scam side more than the AI side.
Sure, but how will Tidal consistently determine AI generated music? This is new frontier of spam.
So begins the Clone Wars...
> how will Tidal consistently determine AI generated music?
Is this their responsibility? Just restrict payment to the registered copyright holder or their delegate, require registration of copyright for music to be payment-eligible, and escalate the problem to a federal crime with (presumedly) federal enforcement, no? Sure, some people will commit federal crimes to get a payout, but it's gotta reduce the problem massively.
The real reason is not that people can make money off it, it's that actual people are listening to it.
Let them do, if they like to listen, whom are you to say their tastes are bad ?
> 97% of people can’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human made music
https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/11/deezer-ipsos-survey-ai-m...
People do listen to it and enjoy it but to some degree it becomes a marketing problem. I don't know how to weight the moral issue of someone missing out on a song they would love and instead getting a one they merely like because the ai stuff is flooding the market, but it would be nice to tip the scales a bit in the other way.
I think this is also a reason why X has gotten worse. They pay people for engagement.
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Mechahitler sure isn't helping.
@slop put Twitter in SS bikini.
I haven’t been on Twitter since before Elon took over. Do most users ever interact with Grok?
It waxes and it wanes, but people breathlessly asking Grok "IS THIS TRUE??" is prevalent. People often call on Grok to argue their points for them. The interaction is inflicted.
Meme context: https://x.com/BrunoCendon/status/1926883516890898637
Then they get upset when grok doesn’t agree with Trump/musk and call a computer “woke”
Provide financial incentives to make it worse.
You incentivize ragebait.
Twitter pay you for how much "engagement" your tweets get now. If you post something that angers people you will get a ton of replies, quote-tweets etc.
There are a whole lot of grifters on that platform making thousands of dollars a month winding people up.
That indeed seems like a uniquely terrible thing to do.
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I'm not sure if you actually haven't checked it since, but will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Accounts pushing white supremacy, the reversion of women's rights, hatred towards other on the basis of their race or religion, climate change denial, denial of science and promotion of pseudoscience, etc etc. are heavily promoted across the platform and get millions of engagements.
If you create a new account, the majority of the accounts you are shown and suggested to follow will be those pushing the above.
They've switched to a model of paying their users for engagement, which naturally encourages users to post the most engagement bait they can, which tends to be inflammatory and utterly lacking in depth or nuance.
As a counterpoint to that, I encountered a conversation where people were lamenting the toxic nature of communication and someone described being told to kill themselves for expressing what they felt was a compassionate statement.
Someone asked where that happened and they said "On X" and the response was "Holy shit, That's the kind of thing you expect to see on Bluesky, not X"
The thing is, The comments were terrible, and the average user of either platform would probably wholeheartedly agree that they were terrible.
If you exist in your own little community on these platforms then you don't see those bits. Those hideous extreme elements are there though. I don't know how representative they are of their respective populations, or even how much of it is automated stirring. I'm not sure anyone does. it seems quite difficult to find an analysis that is not pushing an agenda. The nature of agenda driven research over truth driven research makes it much easier to find the agenda driven stuff, because it's only reason to exist is to be found. The hard working people who try and find the nuance are too busy doing that to run a PR operation for their work.
There's a dark irony that with the decline of platforms like Twitter and Reddit descending into places of astroturf and brigading, there are fewer places to find conversations where informed people are discussing things publicly. A person searching for what an informed individual would say on the matter cannot find it. There's not really even any bots pretending to be those informed individuals. The bot game is more basic. Throw so much obviously fake crap around that nobody trusts anything.
This is older than the public internet. My parents got a CB radio circa 1967 and I watched my Mom make the first transmission on the new radio. She promptly received a reply, which told her to take a long walk on a short pier.
So much the same as Facebook?
Honestly same as most socials.
Unless people control their own algorithm, forget about it.
Imagine buying a cooking magazine and it was full of political ads. Who wants that shit?
Facebook has their own sins crawling on their backs, yes.
Interesting. Kinda sounds like they should be paying for lack of engagement.
By turning it into a monetized /b/
CSAM?
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X pays you for engagement if you have the premium subscription. Anyone with a verification symbol will be earning money from significant engagement, hence the rise of engagement bait on the platform.
How do you know / ensure you're getting all sides of the story? For one, many people have left the platform already because of its owner and policies, so you're not hearing those sides anymore.
> I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
Anecdotal; people get paid / pay to post and promote certain content. But that's nothing new on social media.
That said, escaping or avoiding bubbles is good, just be sure you're actually out.
They don't.
What they actually mean by "all sides" is "my side" (that is not typically allowed/supported on other platforms, for reasons they don't want to go into)
As soon as they find the side of the story they already agree with they know that the platform is a marketplace of ideas instead of a bubble.
You get both the white nationalist and the antisemite sides, yes.
as opposed to ye olde twitter where only wholesome racism was allowed
https://web.archive.org/web/20181130015402/https://pasteboar...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180827011518/https://pasteboar...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180827011519/https://pasteboar...
I have this magical ability to think lots of people can suck simultaneously. I’m also able to separate the power and ability to inflict damage of a bunch of shitheads on twitter from the White House and the first ever trillionaire.
don't you think it's fair that all people who suck can express their views now?
No. I don’t think it’s at all okay or fair that the wealthiest man in the world can push great replacement conspiracies and endorse the murder of immigrants (non-white South African division).
Well they defined racism as "you can only be racist if you have power" and they defined having power as being white, so this is totally kosher.
Do you think it will be a net social benefit for people to be taught 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 = 5 with equal weight, and let them come to their own conclusions?
How about if the person who owns the educational institution puts their thumb on the 2 + 2 = 5 side of the balance for their own ends?
Assuming you already pay for 'verification' on X, you just need to get more followers/impressions and then you'll start being paid based on your impressions. If you know/follow anyone with the 'verified' checkmark who has a lot of followers, they'll be getting paid for impressions.
> It's actually gotten better for those of us that value all sides of a given story so we can come to our own conclusions, instead of parroting stuff we hear in bubbles.
1. A different bubble is still a bubble.
2. Regardless of political leanings, paying for engagement is a really bad sign.
> I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
So? You don't have to know anyone being paid for it to be happening. The people who are really motivated by that are often poor by western standards and living on the other side of the world from you.
Facebook also pays for engagement, and what that's lead to is stuff like AI-generated shrimp Jesus and fake "I made this" memes, created by guys in India that don't even know English and don't own a computer. They throw crap at the wall from their cell phones to see what sticks, then do more of that.
IIRC the same thing happens for politics. Just the other day I read that a lot of popular "Alberta separatist" accounts are run by people who don't even live in Canada. They just use AI and shamelessly copy posts made by other accounts.
Paid to engage is a reference to the creator revenue sharing that encourages mass-appeal and ragebait content.
X is not a meritocracy of ideas, either.