This is a much more concise and effective way of communicating my thoughts ha

Yeah I agree with that nuance, as I personally enjoy making AI covers of songs I like in genres that I can't produce myself (old vintage blues covers of 80s new wave songs if you must know). It's a fair amount of work prompting and curating (and editing in some cases). I think they are cool and have shared a few, but they do tend to get lumped in with "ai slop" and some people take offense.

I think a lot of people make an assumption that problems like this are fixed-sized; that by making getting a song easier, that that's the end of the the line.

In my mind the better mindset is to think that the problems are not fixed size, and instead these tools can allow for bigger and cooler projects, and/or projects that wouldn't be possible (or at least would be infeasible) without some kind of technological assistance.

AI tools can be used to create slop that is either "bad" or extremely bland at an effectively-infinite speed. It could also be used to make some really cool and interesting stuff if a person is really willing to spend time and effort to make it cool. Usually this requires more than just "prompting" though.

The difference between this and what we are seeing in this article is you aren't sitting down, grinding out dozens/hundreds of these, then spamming them with little to no regard for anyone else for profit. You do it at small scale, for yourself/friends, and clearly care about the results. You are trying to make something intentionally.

Yes, exactly a good way to put it.

You are describing AI slop.

Not in my book, I know a lot of low/no effort attempts to spam "content creation" channels, no curation, etc that I'd call slop before this. I'm trying to use AI to generate something that did not/would not exist otherwise. It's admittedly probably better because it's using human-written lyrics for the covers (and memories?), but to be honest, 80s new wave lyrics can be pretty hokey. "Any AI = slop" is probably more a belief system than an objective measure.

I don't think what you're doing, or at least what you described, is inherently slop. If you're actively putting in effort to make something you think is cool and to make something you're actively proud of (or at least something that you genuinely want people to enjoy), I don't think that's "slop", or at least I don't think it's bad.

It's certainly different than those low-effort channels that mass upload hundreds of videos a day because they're able to automate the entire video-making process; those are completely soulless, again almost by definition. Those exist to just try and effectively skim revenue from adsense (or subscriber revenue in the case of Deezer), and making something that people will actually "enjoy" isn't the purpose.

Of course, this isn't a new problem; I remember a few years ago (before generative AI became viable for this stuff), there were "tutorials" on the best way to upload hours and hours of noise or silent music to Spotify to extract revenue, and of course let's not forget the infamous "Elsagate" stuff that plagued YouTube. AI has maybe accelerated the problem but it certainly wasn't the first thing to create "slop".

I'm hardly the first person to make this point, but AI is a tool. Tools can be good or bad; if AI is a tool that you can use to actively help you be more creative then I don't think that's bad. If you're just generating something to pad a resume or extract ad revenue, that's slop.