We're Losing Our Sense of Taste

If we get engage with AI sludge, it'll soon be all we have

The Velvet Sundown, a fully AI-band / Edited by author

It’s clear that AI-generated media is going to overwhelm the Internet and everything connected to it. The technology allows mass creation at scale, made at a speed never seen before. With our modern online culture never standing still — be it new trends, viral moments, or formats of the day — generative AI is ready-made to capitalize, pumping our spaces with a tidal wave of here-today-gone-in-two-minutes sludge. 

What I find most interesting is that, when GenAI first appeared, the majority of people dismissed it as something they wouldn’t be interested in. The art was too weird and shiny. The videos were too disfigured and unsettling. The writing was strange, repetitive and robotic. The general consensus was that it was dumb, and a huge waste of resources.

If it’s made by AI, I’m not consuming it.

Yet, as the output has improved — and there is no denying it has — it seems this initial pushback has diminished. A lot of people seem to actually enjoy AI-generated content, and are ready to eat up more.

We should have seen that coming. There’s a simple explanation — too many people have become so lost in platforms, so dictated to by algorithms, ‘for you’ feeds and suggested content, that we’re collectively losing our taste. If not losing, then we’re certainly having it overpowered. Many people don’t have their own interests, preferences and likes (this is how I’m defining taste), and default to what the majority do, or what the algorithm leads them to believe the majority do.

A great example is music’s latest breakout stars, The Velvet Sundown, whose immediate rise to fame is predicated less on the quality of their music, and more on the debate their existence sparked when the story first made its way onto socials.

Are they real or are they AI? Have we been duped? Is it real people masquerading as AI as some kind of art project? Is it just one guy generating an entire discography, laughing their way to the bank? And how in the fucking hell do they already have over 1,000,000 monthly listeners?

For a while, the “band” denied it was AI. Then, a so-called spokesperson gave an interview to the Rolling Stone, in which they justified the project as an "art hoax" and a way of embracing the reality we live in.⁠ ⁠The Velvet Sundown then denounced this spokesperson, accusing them of hijacking their identity (the irony is not lost). Then, the spokesperson admitted they were a hoaxer themselves. Finally, the band updated their Spotify bio, all but confirming the entire thing is AI-generated. It now describes the band as an “ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”

Don’t you just love the Internet?

There’s too much to unpack here, so I’m going to have to bust out the headers.

This is what we want?

The now-solved debate over whether the band is AI or not is not my issue here. I want to state again, for those in the back, that this project has over 1 million monthly views, a figure that has actually increased since the official confirmation that this is not a real band. Even if we assume 50% of that is bots, or some gamed traffic, that's still a lot of people listening to something that's generated with a few clicks here and there through an AI music generator—pure zero effort slop.

Why do we give oxygen to the most low-effort content? This extends beyond AI music; it's happening across our culture as a whole. So many subpar artists, TV shows, films and books, terrible shorts, reels and tired formats, consumed by the masses.

I blame Big Tech and its algorithms. They have created the Vanilla Internet, an era of the Internet that could be summed up as "Why try anything else when you can get the same shit fed to you day in and day out?" An Internet without exploration, without challenge. Algorithms doing nothing but churning out content that keeps people scrolling, that keeps us trapped inside our little tiny walled gardens, addicted to seeing and hearing the same thing over and over, oblivious to everything else the world has to offer. Notice how you rarely get recommendations that match your interests? That’s because they have long ago stopped trying to serve users — the algos of today serve the platforms that created them.

And clearly, the case of The Velvet Sundown, whose music is passable at best, shows how effective the system is. (Again, 1 million monthly listens, Jesus wept!).

This IS what platforms want

Spotify doesn’t give a shit. I’d go further and say that the platform is all too happy to see AI output starting to flood the platform. While not explicitly endorsing the project, The Velvet Sundown appeared on several Spotify playlists, pushing the band out to a wider audience.

Why wouldn't Spotify stick up for the artists — the ones who literally keep the platform alive — and push back against this slop? Oh, of course. Money. Why pay artists what they're worth when you can get away with paying a few of the top artists all the money, and generate knockoffs of the rest that enough people will listen to keep your platform growing. Music generated with AI means more quantity at less cost. That's the bleak truth. 

It’s why Meta is so keen on the idea of entire feeds of generated content. It’s why we will see Netflix and others dabble in generated TV shows and films. It is content without paying artists, actors and creators. And the more we signal to them that we’ll engage with it, the more we’re going to get of it.

The murky waters of AI content

We knew AI content would open up a nasty can of worms, and we’re no closer to coming up with the answers. How do we prevent these platforms from drowning out human-created work?

I suspect we don’t.

The downside affects the human creators pretty hard. AI companies steal artists' work to build their products, then flood the market with imitations, which means less money goes to human creatives. I think of the musicians, struggling to get heard, doing the hard yards of writing, recording, and touring, only to see AI projects emerge and completely outperform —and likely out-earn them —in a matter of weeks. How utterly soul-destroying. Who would want to pursue creative endeavours if that's what they're up against? Hyper-scaled slop that's designed for the masses who don't care what it is as long as it isn't challenging in any way.

We'll see this repeated across all content-driven platforms, and then what comes next? A world where we have AI sludge for the many, and human-led art forms for the few? Humanity has always had underground movements, particularly based around art and music — I guess we just never predicted the next one would be man-made versus machine-made.

The next wave of engagement farming

As I've written about before, this is all by design. Slowly but surely, algorithms have taken over our ability to find our own likes, preferences, tastes and opinions — or perhaps took away our want to find this. As a direct result, taste has become less diluted, less individual, and less broad in its spectrum.

When we all like the same shit, watch the same shit and listen to the same shit, it makes targeting us so much more effective. It makes controlling our consumption and tweaking it to juice the numbers on their growth spreadsheets that much easier. Narrower tastes mean it's easier to sell to us, to learn about us, to put us into marketing profiles, to createcontent that keeps us engaged. Remember, that's the end game for almost all of the Big Tech platforms: engagement at all costs. That's why Meta wants feeds of AI-generated output made by AI-generated profiles. That's why Netflix creates the most paint-by-numbers, minimum brain effort required content. That's why music platforms don't care if real artists get drowned out. That's why platforms are aligning with AI content — it offers huge scale, and the ability to personalise like never before, a chance to turn the dopamine dial to 11.

So far, that has brought us cultural classics like the Stormtrooper vlogs, The Velvet Sundown and the Great Ghibli-fication. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The algorithms will keep getting better (well, worse, but you get the point), and the AI output will keep getting closer to the “real” thing.

Whether it's a smart art project that successfully sheds light on the problem of AI, or a cash grab that's got out of hand, The Velvet Sundown is yet more proof that the masses are going to eat up AI-generated content. We've been spoon-fed by the algorithms for too long. We've lost too many hours to mindless scrolling and consuming, neutering our excitement, our interest, our desire to find new things. We've surrendered our sense of taste and lost the joy of exploration.

And that’s exactly what Big Tech wants.