The Tech Backlash Gets Nastier—and Funnier
An update on fake tech ads, data poisoning, airplane protests, and Homer Simpson as a tool in the war against slop
Last November I suggested that 2026 would witness a tech backlash of unprecedented intensity. And it’s now happening with a vengeance. Silicon Valley is getting skewered everywhere, and to a degree inconceivable just a short while ago.
Just yesterday, The Economist finally grasped how rapidly tech antipathy is mounting—and made AI backlash its cover story.
The latest survey numbers are devastating. Every demographic group is now opposed to AI—especially young people, previously the most enthusiastic supporters of new tech.
I’ll have some scary stories to share below, but let’s start with a more lighthearted angle. Comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross, for example, recently took their parodies of Silicon Valley marketing out into the real world—via a series of make-believe marketing campaigns.
I share a few examples here with permission.
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The first poster is absurd. But it’s also an accurate depiction of the circular accounting behind the AI boom.
AI is also the target here.
Here’s my favorite. And it’s all the funnier if you’ve walked around San Francisco recently and seen meaningless slogans of this sort plastered all over the city.
I’ll share one more. It captures the marked inanity of the current moment, when tech companies are in a race to monetize the impoverishment of their own workforce—and the population at large.
This mockery of tech is even showing up in traditional comedy settings—for example Saturday Night Live.
Not every pushback to encroaching tech is quite so gentle.
Consider the case of “Mr. Daniels,” a 25-year-old man from England. He knows that AI will rob every music file on the web for training—so he decided to poison the data.
How did he do it? According to Tuned Into Tech, it happens like this:
He took his entire music library of 2,000 records, stripped out the original vocals, and replaced every single one of them with the voice of Homer Simpson. Then he uploaded all of them to Soulseek. He didn’t change the metadata, the file names, the artist tags, the album information. They all stayed exactly the same.
A listener might not notice at first. Some of these songs have long intros, and those are unchanged. But as soon as the singing begins, Homer Simpson takes over. When AI tries to steal this for training, it gets fooled—and contaminates its own data set.
So somewhere deep in a training algorithm’s data set is the audio of Homer Simpson which the AI will assume sounds like [for example] Madonna, Rihanna, or maybe even Sean Paul. The model doesn’t know the idfferennce. It just ingests the data and treats that like the truth.
And that is exactly what Mr. Daniels is hoping for.
He wants “to introduce noise, chaos” into the bots that are putting human musicians out of work.
“Mr. Daniels” is not an isolated example. Musician Benn Jordan has also been “poison-pilling” music files in hopes of disrupting AI.
In recent months, he has watched in horror as “tech companies started raising millions of venture capital dollars and scraping my music without my consent.” They now use his own work to generate “shittier music with it that is inadvertently associated with my name—and then attempting to resell that in the same economy in which I make money from my music.”
As a result, he has stopped releasing music. But he hasn’t walked away from the battle—instead Jordan has developed “a type of encoding that not only makes a music file more or less untrainable by generative AI companies, but actually has the ability to decrease the quality and efficiency of their entire data set.”
“Unethical generative AI companies have made artists feel incredibly powerless for quite some time now,” he adds, “but all of that is about to change.”
He describe his poison pill program in this recent video.
Other music lovers are fighting back in even more extravagant ways.
Consider the protesters who hired two planes to fly over an AI music conference in Santa Monica—displaying huge banners—one read “STEALING MUSIC IS BAD KARMA” and the other said “SAY NO TO SUMO.”
The protest is the work of the Human Artistry Campaign—a coalition advocating the responsible use of AI. “AI can never replace human expression and artistry,” the organization declares on its website. But they aren’t trying to shut down the technology; they just want AI music companies to operate fairly. So HAC’s demands are reasonable: essentially transparency, trustworthiness, and respect for artists’ rights.
Still other critics of AI are building practical tools that music fans can use to counter slop. Deezer, for example, just announced the launch of an AI detector that will identify bot tracks on your streaming playlists. They claim it is 99.8% accurate.
Other opponents of AI have set up shop on YouTube, where they expose the abuses of the technology, and denounce the people responsible. There’s some irony in this situation—because YouTube is owned by Alphabet, which is the single biggest investor in AI computing capacity.
But indie creators help pay the bills at Alphabet. So the company is in the uncomfortable position of relying on the same people they are threatening with their AI investments—who are now outspoken in their opposition to AI.
In fact, the most popular music commentators on YouTube are almost uniformly opposed to AI. Check out, for a start, Rick Beato, Adam Neely, Anthony Fantano, Steve Terreberry, and Danny Sapko.
Fantano, for example, recently released a video entitled “AI Music Is Evil”—you can’t say he is mincing his words. Beato’s take is just as straightforward; his video is called “I’m Sick of This AI Crap.” Adam Neely’s recent interview with Alex O’Connor is uploaded as “AI Music Is Not Music.”
Hey guys, what do you really think?
Terreberry provides the ultimate example of AI hallucination. In a moment of frustration, he asks an AI generator to build a song around his lyrics—but his “lyrics” are just random letters:
izuxfbkafdabguizdaluidhgzxfuk….
Even so, the bot will not refuse, and actually builds a terrible song from this prompt. It’s so stupid that it went viral.
And it’s not just music pundits who hate AI. Fans are just as angry. If you doubt it, read the comments these YouTubers get from their millions of subscribers. Surveys back this up. Depending on your source, somewhere between 60% and 88% of consumers express a preference for human-made music.
A recent study from Luminate tries to measure this growing hostility to slop. Their data shows that, once again, younger people are the most incensed. Over the course of just six month, support for AI music among Gen Alpha and GenX fell ten percent!
If you take all this into consideration, it’s easy to predict how this story will end. AI has lost the battle for public acceptance. With each passing month, tech companies are more hated. The probability of Mark Zuckerberg or some other tech billionaire turning this around is almost zero.
Of course, the slop purveyors won’t just go away. But they will be forced to push their tech secretly, behind the scenes, avoiding transparency at all costs. They now know that the best way to force AI into the mainstream is by disguising it as a human creation—so expect to see more scandals like the Velvet Sundown fiasco and the great fake jazz music crisis.
But what will they actually achieve by relying on deception to such a degree? It will only make people all the angrier.
So you should expect the tech backlash to escalate further. In the very near future, AI supporters will represent less than ten percent of the populace—roughly the size of a crazy cult. That’s why this story will end unhappily for Silicon Valley. It’s just a matter of time.
Add this to the backlash: Just putting the finishing touches on "Substack voices you can trust: An AI-mish writers directory". I will not waste a second reading AI-enhanced/ augmented/ scented writing, but instead throw my time, attention, and support behind authors who embrace fully human creation. Please add your recommendations for authors who have committed to not using AI in their writing here https://substack.com/@ruthgaskovski/note/c-263953437 .
The goal of this is not only to direct readers toward “writers for humanity” (see writersagainstai.net), but also to affirm writers that their fully human work matters, offering an antidote to AI-encroachment in the creative process.
The Homer Simpson stunt made me laugh.