Welsh music lover and musician Mike Chaffin created an internet radio station, AI Slop FM, which plays music created by artificial intelligence on a par with tracks recorded by real musicians.
Welsh music lover and musician Mike Chaffin created an internet radio station, AI Slop FM, which plays music created by artificial intelligence on a par with tracks recorded by real musicians.
At the same time, as The Register writes, listeners are not told which tracks were created thanks to AI, because the founder of the radio station wants to check whether listeners really hate AI music as they are commonly thought.
Mike Chaffin runs a radio station single-handedly from the town of Ammanford in Carmarthenshire.
As part of his experiment, Chaffin removes any mention of AI in the tracks, because ultimately he wants to find out what listeners really think about AI music when they have no additional information other than the music itself.
The free 24-hour radio station asks listeners to rate tracks on a scale from S to E, as well as indicate how the music makes them feel, and leave written feedback about the tracks. The most popular works eventually make it to a weekly chart called the Slop 40.
Anyone can submit a track to this radio station, including both real musicians and AI music creators.
“There seems to be a deep-rooted fear in the industry about music created by artificial intelligence,” Chaffin commented.
The station is still in beta right now, with Chaffin waiting for enough applications to fill out his schedule across genres before fully launching it.
At the same time, he is pleasantly surprised by the quality of the music sent, although he still listens to each track to make sure that no one is trying to pass off famous hits as his own work.
Chaffin believes that many perfectly decent tracks on streaming platforms never find an audience, whether created by a human or a machine, so he hopes that AI Slop FM will give some of these underrated songs a chance to be heard.
Chaffin isn’t too bothered by the thought of what would happen if listeners began to rate music created by artificial intelligence higher than music created by humans.
"If the machines win, then their creators clearly deserve to be heard, deserve an audience. If the musicians win, then that will calm them down," he says.
He also wants to see how his radio station’s top five or ten hits will correlate with the official music charts.
As dev.ua wrote, over the past year, the streaming service Spotify has removed more than 50 million tracks from its recommendation algorithms, which it classified as low-quality music or spam generated by artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, data obtained from a hacker attack on music AI developer Suno confirms that the company trained its models by mass-collecting millions of songs and lyrics from popular platforms, including YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius.
