I am a musician/music profucer who made trance music (subgenre of electronic music) for 18 years. I had my ups and downs in this scene, a few releases accumulated during that period, occasional breaks etc… but nothing had me prepared for what was to come.
I had already noticed an infestation of AI generated cover art in the past years. While it was quite deplorable, I figured the music itself, at the very least, was safe. Knowing how passionate this community can be about what is “real trance” and what isn’t, I figured that any kind of “AI music” or anything AI related being used in the genre would be met with universal rejection and controversy (similar to how back in the early 2010s there was massive backlash over the “housification” of trance music as a result of the EDM boom in the USA).
Boy, I was SO wrong and naïve in thinking like this.
Late last year on Facebook, a relatively well-known music producer had posted an (obviously Chat got generated) announcement late last year that he will be using “AI generated vocals” in his music going forward. One of the biggest trance music forums had a discussion about this and based on the posts I saw there, the main opinions ranged from “you can’t stop AI” and “what u gonna do about it, start a civil war bro” to outright full on support of generative AI. Barely anyone was calling this out as unacceptable behaviour from a producer and a terrible thing to do in general for the health of the scene. I found that that same forum is being moderated/administered by pro-AI shills, as one of the admins even had a post encouraging people to “post their AI generated tracks here”.
All of this was incredibly disturbing and heartbreaking on so many levels… it made me deeply unmotivated to continue making any trance music, as well as deeply depressed, a depression I am STILL suffering from. What’s the point of making this niche music? Why spend 10+ hours on a single track only for it to be listened to by pro-AI shitheads that would gladly throw you and everyone else under the bus for some pitiful crumbs of dopamine? Why throw pearls for swine?
Every day was full of mental suffering. Back in spring this year it got so bad I was nearly ready to end things… until I mustered up the mental strength to simply… let go.
Letting go of my attachment to this beloved music scene was incredibly difficult. I had pretty much grown up with this scene, spent my adolescence and young adult years listening to trance daily and producing it myself under a couple of different aliases. Seeing the community just blatantly accept AI slop invading, even mostly supporting generative AI in general, it was incredibly heartbreaking.
– On a related note, I’ve also lost two close, longtime friends, both trance fans, to AI psychosis. I never expected those people to ever end up and be this way, it came as a shock.
The first one (let’s call him K) was also a trance producer-turned-metalhead nowadays leading a metalcore band. I noticed last year in 2025 already that K was using AI generated slop on socials promoting his bad, using it for covers and also for “female vocals”. I confronted him about it only for him to get angry, call it a “small issue” and make bullshit arguments about how AI isn’t even that bad, how it’s actually “greener than traditional art” etc. I temporarily stopped talking to him after this conflict hoping that maybe he would come to his senses and realize the error of his ways.
I later found out that K is an active user on a Reddit subreddit that defends AI “Art”. He even made posts about me there about our fallout over his use of gen AI, hoping to have the other lunatics give him validation about how he is in the right and I’m insane for calling him out. Reading all the insults and labels the AI defending lunatics commented about me (“chronically online” “12 years old” “not a true friend” etc.) was difficult. Of course I cut off all contact with him after this. At the time I didn’t really let this whole thing get to me, I figured that this would be just an isolated case.
Then, back in spring this year (during the peak of my severe depression because of gen AI), I lost another friend (let’s call him N). He was a diehard trance fanatic since the 90s, and a long time supporter of my own music, a confidant in a way. When I complained to N about my depression caused by the trance scene being destroyed by AI slop, N completely tone deaf to my woes and concerns. I tried to tell him about how bad gen AI is for society, how it is built through theft, how evil billionaires are supporting it… he wouldn’t listen. He would tell me about how “there are more important things to be concerned about, like Donald Trump” etc. and labeled me as having “bipolar disorder”. I couldn’t really understand why N was acting this way. Then, I found out on Facebook, purely by coincidence, his posts in certain Atheism groups. The posts were AI generated “comics” he generated with one of the widely available online generators. Now it all made sense – it turns out he had already taken a bite of the forbidden apple himself, and was actively generating AI slop and publishing it on various Facebook groups, no wonder he was reluctant to even TALK about this subject. Another friend lost.
Life hasn’t really been the same since. I used to be a passionate person full of hopes and dreams but now I feel like an empty shell of my former self. Losing my two closest friends, and the music scene I had surrounded myself with so long has severely impacted my quality of life.
Is there any hope going forward?
TLDR: Musician of nearly two decades, AI slop infested my niche music scene and most people in the scene either completely don’t care or even support AI slop; how I lost two longtime friends over gen AI.
Removed by mod
because ai voices are trained without consent from the actual vocalists, comparing it to vocaloid/auto tune/any vocal library is worthless because they all get their source material ethically
In addition to what the other comment said, those other options don’t have the same level of environmental damage. They don’t contribute to consolidating wealth and power in the hands of a few oligarchs. They don’t destroy the entire electronics market for everyone. Gen AI is damaging in so many ways.
Thinks like vocaloid or autotune actually require you to input settings that will deterministically and predictably change the sound of the waveform. Art made with them is direct intentional expressions made by the artist. (Personally, I hate autotune, but that’s subjective. It’s not the same as using AI, it’s more analogous to an electric guitar. You’re using electricity to predictably and consciously change the sound of your guitar. The equivalence your comparison is drawing would be more like saying that using a guitar at all is AI because your fingers aren’t making the sounds, the strings are. With these tools, you control both the input and output; with gen ai you only really control the input.)
Synthesizers are even further away from AI, because you have to design the wave form from scratch on a real synth.
All of these tools require knowledge, practice, and skill to use. You need to have musical knowledge to make them sound good.
Ai just takes your plain English prompt and puts together an amalgamation of stolen work. There is nothing expressive about it, there is nothing original about it. Nobody disputes that you can make genuine music with the tools you named, because it is understood in the greater music community that not everyone can use those tools, and not everyone has an artistic vision to manifest. Using AI is not a human creating anything, it’s a human asking a computer to make something for them, and then just accepting whatever the computer slops out.
Music does not need to be easier to create, that would ruin the point of music. The point is the struggle to learn and achieve, and the feeling you get when you overcome it. The point is you learn and grow while doing it. The point is that you outlet and share your emotions outside of simple verbal explanations. The point is to share something human with other humans, and have a connection with them. The point is the journey, not the destination.
Life is supposed to have friction, that’s what makes it enjoyable.
This is the slippery slope. Everyone coding with Claude says that work is going faster as long as people check it and it still throws out wild hallucinations. Where do you think those people will be in 5 years? If AI continues to develop, they will be gone. If AI crashes, they have to learn what was so different about the Claude code they didn’t have to check and will be years behind in practical applications. Every use of gen AI, LLM’s, or any other dubious ‘intelligence’ in lieu of human labor is a long noose on a speeding train you better hope you can outrun.
For music specifically, vocoders or even something like a vocaloid is still controlled at the most basic level. A flute doesn’t play without a human breath in it. The keys don’t press without fingers. A vocaloid is a silent string of bits until someone sits and gives it parameters. AI is being allowed to set those parameters and then having it’s worked checked. It may seem small but it is everything.
Unless we’re arguing about what “genuine” is, I dispute it completely. It’s like the “big 80s drums” - everything with it will sound ridiculously dated in awhile.