DJs and producers are now marketing their music as “not AI slop” on YouTubeI listen to a lot of music mixes on YouTube, particularly passively while working — I’ve always found it an invaluable platform for music discovery. In the past year, I’ve noticed more curators, DJs and producers being forced to label their music as “human-made” or “not AI slop” as proof that it’s not part of the swarm of generative AI music flooding the platform.
Arcologies, a d’n’b artist with millions of views on mixes of his self-produced music, leaves this disclaimer in his YouTube description: “This is NOT AI music…Many of these songs were made with hardware samplers, synths, and mixers. The songs in this video were recorded to cassette.” They follow this with a list of production notes for each song.
Meanwhile, gesus8, a DJ uploading to YouTube, titled his latest mix “real deep house mix (no AI slop)”, and lists the artists and tracks in the mix. Another channel, Orion, is uploading an hour’s worth of original music every day, which is admittedly much more dubious, but claims that a group of nine friends are responsible for the tracks, with notes on the tools they use to produce.

Their reasoning is genuine. Countless channels have erupted alongside the advancement of AI apps like Suno and Udio, with their content blurring the lines between music made with a text prompt versus music made with hours of human toil. MusicMagpie estimated earlier this year that there are 1.63 million AI cover songs on YouTube. Meanwhile, mood mixes have surged in popularity — that is, hour-long mixes on YouTube with titles such as time stopped about three hours ago and Alone Tonight — Jazz for the Quiet Soul — which are track after track of generated music.
‘Just Thinking…Retro Jazz’ is a three-hour playlist of mellow, reflective jazz with soft piano, guitar, sax, double bass and brushed drums. The songs themselves are unidentifiable, replete with digital artefacts, and — at the very end of the video’s description — come with a label: “How this was made: Altered or synthetic content.” This doesn’t even disclose to the millions of viewers that the music is made with artificial intelligence; it instead uses more ambiguous language.
The top comment reads: “I’m 73 years young. My daughter and I had a fantastic day together. I got home, and a few minutes after, she texted me to say she had arrived. She then sent me the link because I’m a big fan of jazz. I’ve been listening to it for the past 3 hours.”

Shouldn’t we be more concerned that listeners are being hoodwinked into thinking they’re hearing authentic musicianship in the music they come to love?
Interestingly, some of YouTube’s audience seem undeterred by AI-created content. Many celebrate the ‘artistry’ of the AI used to make said music, and pass it off with comments such as “music is music as long as it is good and fun to listen to, that’s all there is to it.”
On the AI-focused channel, Hyperdrive Sound, you’ll find a slew of charming comments. Here’s one in response to a user pointing out that the music is generative AI: “For most of us, it was obvious that this was AI from the moment we clicked. If you lack the pattern recognition to identify AI, then you aren’t entitled to an explicit warning. Maybe start paying a little closer attention.”
Where do we go from here? One next step is obvious: force a more visible label on any AI-generated content. Across most major platforms, the ‘made with AI’ label (if it’s there at all) feels tucked away, as if to intentionally deceive users that they’re consuming AI-made content. It must be front-and-centre to prevent 7-year-olds and 73-year-olds believing they’re listening to genuine human musicianship.
As MusicTech writer Clovis McEvoy said earlier this year: “Record labels, and even some artists, might baulk at the prospect of having to disclose whether a song was produced using AI mixing and mastering tools, but professionals at all levels of the industry – not just those at the top – deserve some protection from AI counterfeiting their work.”
A hopeful prediction is that we start to see smaller, human-focused platforms arise to push against the major services offering up AI content. Dystopian as it may seem, the opposite already exists in OpenAI’s Sora, which is a social media-style app delivering solely AI content, and attracted a million users in just five days. If giant corporations are to continue rolling out such material in the pursuit of increasing shareholder value, we must have independent entities platforming only the opposite, with a blanket ban on anything that’s AI-generated. Disappointingly, the reality is likely that these businesses would not prove as popular, but it’s possible they could flourish with a dedicated, proactive community.
In any case, the burden of proof should not lie on independent artists who are painstakingly crafting and marketing their music. And listeners should not be forced to seek out “not AI slop” labels when discovering new music.
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