There are tells but it's getting harder and harder. One thing is, you have to look for the people.

Case in point, a few weeks ago I discovered some really good covers of the KPop Demon Hunter songs. So if you don't know the scene, this Netflix musical has been making record breaking profits and numbers and everyone and their brother wants a piece. And the music is so good, and tons of people are doing covers.

A few months ago, "is it on Apple Music/Spotify" wouldn't have been a tell, but now it is. So a lot of these covers are on paid streaming, because covers are perfectly acceptable legally. It's fair use. However, recently AI generated music has started to come up, and the streaming services have recently put their feet down and said "no more." So when you're looking at such a cover on YouTube, it's probably going to have streaming links. It's more convenient to listen on one of those services than it is to watch YouTube, and Spotify pays more than YouTube, and Apple Music pays more than both of them. So that's where they want you to listen. When people are all over the comments saying "put it on Spotify" and they say "nah we're YouTube exclusive," what they're saying is, they aren't allowed on Spotify (or Apple Music). They do want more money, but they won't get any on platforms that ban generative AI. So they stick to YouTube, which is one platform that allows it.

With legitimate art, you can usually find the human behind it. With some art, the artist will want to remain anonymous. In anime, for example, a lot of these artists are underage, and they're savvy, they're not putting themselves out there on social media beyond the art and their anonymous comments. They're still more human than AI, they just won't show their face or say where they're posting from. (And that's just good OPSEC in general.)

There's also the frequency. Art takes time. It takes weeks, months, depending on what it is. AI can do it in seconds. So if they're posting whole new stuff every day, every other day, there's a solid chance they're using AI to make it.

Not all AI slop is completely made by AI. Sometimes they take stuff made by humans and use AI to enhance it somehow. That's what the KPDH stuff was. They were using an AI tool to separate the stems (the individual instruments) and enhancing each one, changing some, altering others.

Anyway, in 2025 now, it's much harder than it ever was before to spot AI slop. The time of six fingered hands is gone. Next year, year after, certainly the next decade, it's gonna be next to impossible to tell.

What's worse, these days, AI made stuff is still prompted by humans. All AI slop has a human behind them. But what happens when the AI starts doing this stuff on its own? Right now, AI is interacted with by humans. Soon, AI will initiate the interactions. It could be doing it already, we don't know.