So first off, let me set this straight.
I actually like GenAI music. It offers me a way to er... "create" tracks that resonate with a particular moment in my life. It's more personal and relevant than anything most artists produce. But that's where it ends - I don't want to hear GenAI mass market slop. Heck, I don't want to hear MOST folk's AI Generated stuff. That's for them. The music I generate is for me.
Moving on from that - I primarily use Spotify currently for music discovery, and up until a few months ago it's been the most reliable way to find new Artists that might interest me. Their algorithm, while not perfect, generally hooked me up with artists that were in the ballpark of what I like and were REAL.
Today, about half of my "Release Radar" is AI generated slop. Some of it is published under their own names and labels which is fine, but others are transparently attempting to dupe listeners by imitating or outright impersonating known bands. However, even in the "nice" case of well labeled and non-impersonating AI tunes, it's significantly getting in the way of finding new stuff.
I think I'm done with Spotify, recent statements from the CEO has me thinking that they don't consider this to be a problem. They aren't looking to fix this issue, and aren't even pretending to.
But the problem is, none of the other music streaming services are in a better situation. None have sought to deal with the artist impersonation problem or general labeling of AI generated music.
I feel like I have to go back to CD's and word-of-mouth like back in the "old days" - at least if I'm to be sure that the music was actually made by a human. But how long would it be before we start getting CD's with AI generated music on them? My hope is that the fad is too "low effort" to bother with pressing vinyl or burning CD's.
How are you discovering new (human) music in this rapidly changing landscape?
I certainly don't doubt the top line trends here in this study. However, I wonder how the fediverse might differ. Anyone can set up a Lemmy or Mastodon instance, regardless of their technical aptitude and desire to secure the instance from toxic content. It's also inherently more anonymous. A more direct comparison might be 4chan not Reddit.
Both of the platforms they studied on have more sophisticated methods to determine bad actors because of their dominance. Particularly Facebook, where a profile is supposed to be mappable to a single, real identity.
That being said, there's a very real concern about how algorithms end up placing these "loud mouths" in other people's feeds. After all, outrage is still something that is preferred by algorithms. So those 3 to 7% of users creating the toxic content, might represent an outsized proportion of views.
It's good to know the reality on these platforms is that most people are reasonable. I guess the bigger question is why people come to the opposite conclusion. And I think that algorithms overly indexing on outrage are part of that.