We Are Winning!
Something has changed in the last few days.
2025 has been the year of garbage culture.
Creators watch in horror as dismal AI slop threatens their livelihoods—and the integrity of their fields. It’s everywhere, spreading faster than a pharaoh’s plague.
In recent months, we’ve been bombarded with millions of lousy AI songs, idiotic AI videos, and clumsy AI images. Error-filled AI texts are everywhere—from your workplace memos to the books sold on Amazon.com.
Even my lowly vocation, music journalism, gets turned into a joke when it’s accompanied by slop images of fake events.
But something has changed in the last few days.
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The garbage hasn’t disappeared. It’s still everywhere, stinking up the joint.
But people are disgusted, and finally pushing back. And they are doing so with such fervor that even the biggest AI companies are now getting nervous and pulling back.
Just consider this surprising headline:
This was stunning news. YouTube is part of the biggest AI slop promoter of them all—namely the Google/Alphabet empire. How can they possibly abandon AI garbage? Their bosses are the biggest slopmasters of them all.
After this shocking news reverberated through the creative economy, YouTube started to backtrack. They said that they would not punish every AI video—some can still be monetized.
But even the revised guidelines are still a major blow to AI slop purveyors. YouTube made clear that “creators are required to disclose when their realistic content is altered or synthetic.” That’s a huge win—we finally have a requirement for disclosure, and it came straight from the dark planet Alphabet.
YouTube also stressed that it opposes “content that is mass-produced or repetitive, which is content viewers often consider spam.” This is just a step away from blocking slop.
What happened?
Maybe the folks at YouTube are just as disgusted by AI as the rest of us. Or maybe we have shamed them into taking action.
“Three out of four AI projects failed to show a return on investment, a remarkably high failure rate.”
My view is that YouTube is (finally) reading the room. I’ve noted before that YouTube is the only part of the Google empire that actually understands creators and audiences. And (unlike their corporate overseers) they have figured out that AI slop is an embarrassment that will tarnish their brand.
The widespread mockery of the fake AI band Velvet Sundown might have been the turning point. This blew up in the last few days, and left AI promoters reeling.
Velvet Sundown is a non-existent AI band that got a million plays on Spotify. These deceptions have occurred in the past, but something different happened this time.
Music fans started mocking Spotify and its alleged promotion of a stupid slop band. The company was subjected to a level of ridicule and angry denunciation it has never endured before.
I received numerous emails and texts from people complaining about this. They felt insulted and duped.
Journalists called this out as a hoax or fraud. And many speculated about Spotify’s role in the charade. After all, the company has been caught promoting AI slop in the past.
But this time Spotify got turned into a joke—or even worse. They were linked to a scam so clumsy that everyone was now making fun of them, as well as scrutinizing their policies and practices.
Rick Beato’s response to Velvet Sundown got two million views—so more people were watching takedowns of the band than listening to it. An industry group even demanded disclaimers and regulation.
And the jokes kept coming. People mocked the slop with more slop
That must be painful to endure, even for the billionaire CEO of a streaming platform.
Whatever the reason, Spotify started to buckle. It actually began imposing restrictions on AI.
“Spotify has now pulled several uploads from the AI act and the associated Velvet Sundown,” reported Digital Music News on July 14.
It felt like the tide was now turning in the war against slop AI music.
Dylan Smith, one of the best sources on this subject, clearly thinks so. “Velvet Sundown’s Spotify pulldown,” he writes, “doesn’t exactly bode well for forthcoming AI releases.”
I’m focused here on AI’s destructive impact on culture, but there are other signs that growing AI resistance is now forcing companies to reconsider their bot mania.
“An IBM survey of 2,000 chief executives found three out of four AI projects failed to show a return on investment, a remarkably high failure rate,” reports Andrew Orlowski. “AI agents fail to complete the job successfully about 65 to 70 percent of the time, says a study by Carnegie Mellon University and Salesforce.”
He also shared the results of a devastating test that debunked AI’s status in its favorite field, namely writing code. This study reveals that software developers think they are operating 20% faster with AI, but they’re actually running 19% slower.
Some companies are bringing back human workers because AI can’t deliver positive results. Even AI researchers are now expressing skepticism. And only 30% of AI project leaders can say that their CEOs are happy with AI results.
This is called failure. There’s no other name for it.
And it will get worse. The Gartner Group is now predicting that 40% of AI agent programs will be cancelled before 2027—due to “rising costs, unclear business value and inadequate risk controls.”
The only thing keeping AI in growth mode is the ridiculously high level of investment in data centers by companies promoting it. But they are increasing supply at a time when demand may already have peaked.
This has happened before in history. It’s called a bubble. And a bubble can continue expanding for a little while—but, sooner or later, it pops.
Based on developments of the last few days, I’m betting on sooner.
"Abandon Ship!"
"Ai, Ai, Cap'n!"
I was at a dinner last Saturday night and my friend put on the track from Velvet Sundown and asked me what I thought. I thought, super clean sounding production, super clean sounding raspy voice, kind of meaningless lyrics.. what’s new?! I have to say I was pretty shocked to find out it was Ai as I’m about to go into the studio soon to record a new bunch of songs I’ve written and it left me feeling pretty defeated. But when I thought about it afterwards I realised that Ai is really just mimicking what is already there. Slop. Not everything is slop of course, we put on Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain afterwards and I felt a lot better.
This technology is not evil in and of itself but it is being used in an evil way. It’s stealing our humanity and we are aiding that process by listening to it and choosing it over something organic. As Tolkien said, and I loosely repeat, “evil cannot create anything itself, it has to steal and mimick everything from the ones who create.”