Welsh music lover and musician Mike Chaffin has created the internet radio station AI Slop FM, which plays music created by artificial intelligence alongside tracks recorded by real musicians.
At the same time, as The Register writes, listeners are not told which of the tracks were created thanks to AI, because the founder of the radio station wants to test whether listeners really hate AI music as much as is commonly thought.
Mike Chaffin single-handedly runs the radio station from the town of Ammanford in Carmarthenshire.
As part of his experiment, Chaffin removes any mentions 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, well, the music itself.
The free round-the-clock radio station asks listeners to rate tracks with letters from S to E, as well as to mark what emotions the music evokes and leave written feedback on the tracks. The most popular works eventually make it into a weekly chart called the Slop 40.
Anyone can submit a track to this radio station, including both real musicians and creators of AI music.
"There seems to be a deeply ingrained fear in the industry of music created by artificial intelligence," Chaffin commented.
Currently, the station is still in beta, and Chaffin is waiting for a sufficient number of submissions to fill his schedule across different genres before fully launching it.
At the same time, he is pleasantly surprised by the quality of the submitted music, although he still listens to every track to make sure no one is trying to pass off famous hits as their own work.
Chaffin believes that many quite decent tracks on streaming platforms never find their audience, regardless of whether they were created by a human or a machine. So he hopes that AI Slop FM will give some of these underappreciated songs a chance to be heard.
Chaffin is not too troubled by the thought of what will happen if listeners start rating 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 it will reassure them," he says.
He also wants to see how the top five or ten hits of his radio station will correlate with the official music charts.
As dev.ua wrote, the streaming service Spotify over the past year removed more than 50 million tracks from its recommendation algorithms, which it classified as low-quality music or AI-generated spam.
Meanwhile, data obtained as a result of 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.