AI Slop Predates AI
Dr. Ethan Hein
AI slop is the hollow, overly polished copycat sound that long predated generative AI. Good art comes from specific human choices and surprising risks, not from interpolating a database of past hits. We should push back on both AI-made and human-made AI slop and instead celebrate music that feels original and particular.
13 Dec 2025
I love 1980s hip-hop because there’s no way to predict it from projecting trends in 1970s pop. It questions basic assumptions! It’s missing elements that you might have thought were necessary (like melodies) and it brings in elements you didn’t know you wanted until you heard them (like samples and turntable scratching.) Now the 1980s rap exists, it’s easy to feed it into an AI as training data and get more 1980s rap, but there’s no way that AI could have produced 1980s rap if it was only trained on 1970s pop.
AI slop existed long before AI did. It’s all the boring, committee-driven copycat filler that has been clogging up the pop charts forever. I think that our job as educators is not just to push back on AI slop made by AI, it’s also to push back on AI slop made by humans. Bob Dylan and the Weavers are better than Peter, Paul and Mary because Peter, Paul and Mary sound like an AI trained on Bob Dylan and the Weavers. The Beach Boys are better than Jan and Dean because Jan and Dean sound like an AI trained on the Beach Boys. Eric Clapton sounds like an AI trained on Albert King. The Eagles sound like an AI trained on Neil Young. Everybody is inspired by somebody, but there’s inspiration and there’s finding correlations in a giant metaphorical database, and they are not the same thing.