Every day, we have to play an increasingly difficult game of “Spot the AI.” There’s the Velvet Sundown’s psych-rock troll; the Japanese gay porn megahit; the lo-fi dreamslop. For the most part, the streaming services haven’t done much to prevent songs like these from appearing on their platforms. YouTube might have given users the option to disclose whether their uploads contained synthetic media, but many obvious AI videos opted to not themselves. And while Spotify announced a crackdown on spammy songs in September last year, they put the onus on whether a song uses AI on the artists themselves.

But the tide’s turning. In June last year, the French streamer Deezer began forcibly tagging songs that they detected used AI. Then two weeks ago, Bandcamp went the farthest of any platform to date. Citing their mission to support musicians as humans and not just “mere producers of sound,” they announced a ban on music and audio “generated wholly or in substantial part by AI.” Anything using AI to impersonate an artist or a style would also be prohibited, in accordance with the company’s existing policies on infringement. They urged users to report anything that seemed to violate these rules, and said the company reserved the right to remove anything they found suspicious.

Artists, writers, publications, and a deluge of internet commenters cheered Bandcamp’s move, while the popular Reddit page r/indieheads—which acted early by banning all AI music submissions mid last year—lit up in approval.

But there was also backlash. Musician-technologist Holly Herndon, who’s long experimented with machine learning in her music, called the ban a “tourniquet” in a long thread on X. She wrote that the ban was ill-advised and impossible to fully adjudicate, if not outright bad because it will prevent humans from “experimenting with an era defining medium.” “We live with infinite media now,” she reasoned. “I encourage platforms to be more curated, but enforcing a hard human/AI binary is not the right way to address this long term.” She added that even the canniest methods people use to detect AI, like searching for “artifacts” left by programs like Suno, are fallible. What if someone uses AI to produce a song and then gets someone to organically re-record it?

“A lazy assumption with ai is that the laziest people use it, and the most dedicated people use traditional tools,” she writes. “Are software developers running claude code agents lazy or insatiable? I am insatiable. I want more sounds and opportunities to cut and mutate and intervene.” Ghostly founder Sam Valenti also worried that the ban could discourage musical experimentation, urging people to instead judge art on its aesthetic value, regardless of the tech used, and to deploy their disdain “to foster more critique and a keen desire for greatness.”

Herndon is right that media has gone infinite. We are all Charlie Kirks liable to be undressed and race-swapped by Grok, slippery and fungible and glued to 24-hour looping lo-fi beat mixes. She and the other detractors are also correct that the ban will be extremely difficult to put into practice, since the quality of AI music has risen to the level of and, in some cases, surpassed milquetoast human songs. Take Sienna Rose, who has over 3.5 million monthly listeners and multiple songs on Spotify’s USA Viral 50. Deezer reported that its AI detection tool flagged Sienna Rose’s music as AI-generated, and it has “telltale hissing” and other artifacts that characterize songs created on apps like Suno. Would that be enough evidence for Bandcamp to remove Rose’s music, or would they need to do their own investigation?

I went out to Bandcamp to get some clarity on the policy. A representative declined to describe programs or methods they’d use to detect AI, citing “security purposes.” They also declined to share internal data on how many AI uploads they’ve already dealt with. I sent the representative a list of individual albums to check whether Bandcamp would flag them as “in substantial part generated by AI” (including Herndon’s own AI-generated music and experimental AI-themed projects like Black Banshee’s The World’s First AI-Generated Album), but they declined to comment on individual cases. Instead, they told me that line in the policy “refers to music where the primary creative elements, like composition, vocals, or instrumental performance, are created by AI rather than a human artist. The policy is focused on authorship, not tools: who is doing the creative work, and how that work is presented to fans.”

That doesn’t really clear up the confusion. What makes this gray area tricky is that authorship and AI assistance are interwoven, and programs allow for degrees of artistic outsourcing. Someone could prompt-wizard an entire song, or they could devise part of it and ask AI to enliven it. A Slovakian experimental artist could sculpt an “algorithmic virtual orchestra” out of a never-ending feed of live-coded texturebabble. The “primary creative elements” in this case are synthetic, but their design was heavily curated and custom-coded, so would it make the cut? An authorless AI song would have to be a completely autonomous robo-formed project.

It’s also unclear how aggressively Bandcamp will enforce the rule. There are still dozens of blatant AI albums on the platform (Bandcamp even has a tag specifically for “ai music”) since the new policy went into place. While Massachusetts metalhead duo databots declared that their 2017 album Coditany of Timeless, the first-ever fully AI-synthesized album on Bandcamp, was now “officially banned art,” it’s still fully playable. And there are active pages on Bandcamp that have adopted the same skeevy tactics that grifters use on Spotify and YouTube; across a few months last year, the account Cyberfunk Station puked out over 30 albums packed with barely distinguishable, nimble disco grooves.

If an artist’s work ends up getting blocked under suspicion of AI, the Bandcamp representative said they could request a review, provide context on how it was created, and potentially be reinstated. Though the whole adjudication and litigation process sounds not fully thought through and over the top, it’s probably a step in the right direction, especially if it pressures other DSPs to think harder about the shite they’re surfacing and at times boosting.

One of the refrains I’ve heard repeatedly from music heads hyped about AI is that every great new invention—synthesizers, Auto-Tune, DAWs—has been derided on arrival. I’m sympathetic to the argument, but people need to consider what that tech brought into the world (and the less grave environmental consequences they posed!). A bounty of genres from jungle to hyperpop to whatever “cloud-rock” is wouldn’t exist without the ability to set a drum at inhuman speed using FL Studio or douse voices in pitch correction. Artists should be encouraged to mangle and manipulate AI tech for all its worth, but we also need to be real about the material results it’s had so far and the ratio of rubbish to redeeming brilliance. Worst case is AI will continue to alienate and estrange people from real creativity, while the next gen gives up on chasing newness and seeks the least-effort, lowest-friction route of producing AI mid.

Currently, AI doesn’t produce the new; it zhuzhes up the old, like a kid moving food on his plate to make it seem like he ate more. It allows people to efficiently make something that already exists. The most I’ve ever enjoyed largely-AI spawn was the deluge of artfully concocted Carti fakes that a whole lotta feds puked out pre-MUSIC. I’m sure if OsamaSon generated 1,000 OsamaSonSon tracks, I wouldn’t be able to resist some of the chaotic permutations of bass and ad lib.

But right now, nearly every fleck of AI folly that’s risen to the top has been utter dreck. This includes lazy genre ripoffs like Let Babylon Burn’s “I Forgive That Man,” a despairing reggae crooner starring an AI man with “scars on me soul” who assuages his guilt by going to church. It hit the top 10 on Spotify’s Viral 50 for Norway, Germany, and Switzerland. Then there’s even cheaper spectacles of cultural fraud, like YouTube accounts with tens of millions of plays imitating “Urithi Ancestral African” music and salsa. Ultimately, if they’re not doing it already, AI will allow DSPs like Spotify to bypass paying royalties to humans entirely; the company’s own AI artists will clog up every chart. Just like in every other industry, AI is being hungrily dropped in as a shortcut to spike capital.

The AI creations most intriguing to me have come from the people just fucking around with it, like the clips where AI simulations of Trump and Biden argue about griefing in Minecraft Hunger Games and AI country erotica vandalizing Morgan Wallen and scandalizing boomers. It’s never music I would actually listen to, but it produces surplus value in the realm of pure novelty, not bargain-bin slop so much as next-level ventriloquism. Similarly, I’ve been stunned by some AI creepypasta—grotesque assemblages of mutilated body parts and never-before-seen creatures. I wonder if there is some way to get there with AI music: to conjure up the unthinkable, instead of just (at best, tastefully) regurgitating preexisting voices and vibes.

Even the artsier takes on AI music, like internet abysslord Jon Rafman’s Cloudy Heart, have fallen flat. The world’s first AI e-girl isn’t addictive or annoying, or soulless in a sort of delicious haunted way—the music just sounds like some minor-league royalty-free pop cover. More alluring is Ye’s early AI-assisted draft of his upcoming album Bully that locks in on the hollow artifice of it all, the human as damaged conductor of a symphony of cracked and askew ghost doubles.

The correct attitude toward this stuff is probably a cautious cynicism—knowing bad actors will continue to milk AI for the most mercenary purposes, while not ruling out the chance for bizarre genius. Even if it’s just moral window dressing, it’s hard to fault a company that has historically championed indie musicians to take this stance. Being polarized too far on either side feels foolhardy; while an aggressive ban might be too much for how nuanced and new this technology is, that doesn’t mean DSPs should throw their hands up and let culture-appropriating refuse pollute popular playlists. While all signs point to slop, the real answer is somewhere in the middle: an agnosticism open to being seduced.