Stinkpiece: You Should Start A Blog to Defeat AI Garbage
You! Yes, you! Not that other guy, you!!!
2025 was a year full of steaming bullshit for most fields, but I’d argue it represented a major shift in the music-sphere. In other terms, the music industry/community has taken a sharp left turn into oncoming traffic and/or a ditch filled with battery acid. In addition to the time-honored tradition of fucking over the musicians who actually make the art we slurp up and the modern pillar of music streaming known as “stealing revenue from artists and using it to buy stock in death machines,” it appears that 2025 was a major year in AI’s war against human creativity in music (other fields too, such as literature and visual art).
Music in the internet age, metal or not, already has a massive competition problem before factoring in AI. With the traditional gatekeepers of the music industry bypassed, thousands upon thousands of new songs and albums are uploaded to streaming services and online marketplaces every single day. As you can imagine, a large chunk of those songs released are from passionate musicians and artists who do their best to put out something that speaks to their experiences or interests. At the same time, there’s a weighty deluge of tech-bro sycophants uploading algorithmically-generated garbage resulting from their imprecise digits slapping against a keyboard, with such thoughtful prompts like “write me a metal song about Barney the Dinosaur.”
Artistic depiction of why your children won’t have clean drinking water.
And, while this issue has been creeping up throughout the 2020s, it clearly reached a fever pitch last year. Deezer reported that 34% of new songs uploaded to its service are fully AI-generated in November. Robo-crapola has begun to crop up on Tiktok and Billboard charts. Millions of rubes are streaming songs from fictitious bands only marginally less creatively-bankrupt than your average Led Zepplin worship bands. Major labels (infamous for doing moral, upright things with their intellectual property) have settled copyright cases for a piece of the malformed DALL-E-generated pie. Need I remind you of you know who fighting for the gospel, having his name honored?!?!
The trve, kvlt hessians of metal (read: virgin incels) are far from innocent in this conversation, with various legendary (read: washed up) acts like Deicide and Pestilence taking a liking to the most rancid AI album covers you could(n’t) possibly dream up. Any readers of our yearly bad art roundup can attest to this being an issue with unknown bands as well. We’ve also seen a flood of opportunistic charlatans uploading random algo-goop onto actual bands’ pages—with seemingly very little care from the streaming services themselves.
Professional bald-o and iconic music critic Anthony Fantano recently coined this wave of garbage juice “The Slopocalypse” in his recent piece on the topic, which is a perfect way of describing it. Tech-bro startups, industry conglomerates, hedge fund stooges, and scum-sucking “prompt artists” all view you, the “consumer,” as little more than a pig; sucking down whatever earth-melting techno-feces they ladle into your digital trough. This is mirrored in our society’s attitudes around art, where meaning and artistic intent behind pieces go unacknowledged (this is probably rich coming from a resident slam-death-metal head, but you know what I mean) and some of our biggest creatives have reached levels of insulated mediocrity usually reserved for the shitty offspring of monarchs. Speaking of things that are insular, algorithms are responsible for siloing incurious listeners into a corner on streaming services, encouraging “stan” culture and discouraging artistic experimentation and songs over three and a half minutes, the latter you can also thank attention-span killing short form content for.
Clearly, we as musicians, writers, creatives, patrons, and humans have to cultivate a better space for music and art where we can, as the multi-national corporations Napalm Death has been warning us of have proven they’d see all of creativity burned for the right price. We here at the Satanic Shitter (nickname pending) are doing our part to highlight artists and bands who still care about who is really writing their 0-3-5 riffs and really drawing their album covers of a goat fucking Satan or whatever. Platforms like Ampwall and CodaMusic have taken definitive stands against AI music and forgo algorithmically generated recommendations in lieu of human curation.
That human curation is a big part of how I’ve been able to stay on top of music, metal or not, that I find genuinely creative and exciting, whether that be recommendations from friends and colleagues, reviews from social personalities and publications, and grassroots excitement over upcoming musicians. So, how can you join the fight for a better musical world? Start a blog! Apply to write for an existing one! Do what you need to do to be a voice for underground musicians that you care about! Start a YouTube/TikTok channel where you recommend real music! If you’re not a writer or unsure of your abilities, support blogs and creators who do show up for metal and beyond.
I’m under no delusion that Toilet Ov Hell will single-handedly give Sam Altman of OpenAI and Mikey Shulman of Suno proverbial atomic wedgies, but by cultivating communities of music lovers who have respect for and interest in the craft, we can make places that celebrate what we all care most about in the medium. If you’re really fucking TRVE, put your money where your mouth is and try to convince me why random-war-metal-record-#2852 is better than random-death-metal-record-#125124!
As Fantano puts it in the previously mentioned video, “..it’s going to be on to us to not only foster communities and business models where people who are actually making good stuff … create communities and spaces where those people can thrive … but also do everything we can to make sure that most of our attention is not being stolen away by all of the AI slop bullshit…” Beyond that, it’s important that we as music lovers talk to one another about the medium we hold so dear and ensure that the spaces we cultivate are in line with our collective values, regarding AI or not.
Apologies if this screed comes off ramble-y or overly-pompous, but music is incredibly important to me. This artform has saved my life more times than I can count and is beyond special to me and to see it so thoroughly cheapened by unchecked greed and capitalist rot brings me real pain. In a cruel world where dorky fascists fail upwards to commit depraved acts of cowardice and villainy, music is a voice for us all to speak our minds and express how we feel (or express the sounds my plumbing makes for brutal death metal). That tool is far too powerful to be lost to Chat-PooPooPee.
P.S. – Make sure what you are reading isn’t itself AI generated, as much of Google’s search recommendations are full of slop articles.
