Somewhere in a bedroom in suburban Ohio, a teenager with no musical training opens Suno on a laptop, types a sentence about heartbreak and rain, and 22 seconds later receives a fully produced indie folk ballad with layered harmonics, fingerpicked guitar, and vocals that sound like they belong on a Spotify editorial playlist. The song is not exceptional. It is also not bad. It exists in a strange new territory that the music industry has no vocabulary for: technically competent, emotionally coherent, and created with less effort than it takes to boil an egg.

This is not a hypothetical future. This is the present. Suno, the generative AI music platform founded by former Meta researchers, now counts over 100 million users worldwide and generates roughly 7 million songs per day. That figure is worth sitting with. It means Suno's user base reproduces the equivalent of Spotify's entire 100-million-song catalogue approximately every two weeks. In November 2025 the company raised $250 million in its Series C round at a $2.45 billion valuation, and by early 2026 reported annual recurring revenue of around $300 million. Its competitor Udio, founded by former Spotify AI researchers, offers similar capabilities with a focus on granular production control. Both platforms charge around $10 per month for standard access.

The sheer volume is staggering, but it is the quality that forces the harder questions. In November 2025, Deezer and Ipsos conducted a survey of 9,000 people across eight countries and found that 97 per cent of respondents could not distinguish between AI-generated music and human-made music in a blind listening test. That same month, an AI-generated country track called “Walk My Walk,” credited to the anonymous project Breaking Rust, topped Spotify's Viral 50 USA chart and the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart. It was among the first AI-generated songs to top a Billboard ranking, though the milestone was narrower than the headlines suggested. Country Digital Song Sales is a low-volume metric: number one required only a few thousand purchases, and at roughly a dollar per download, around $3,000 in sales was enough to claim it. The track did not appear on the main streaming country charts, making it notable but not a mainstream hit.

These are not glitches in the system. They are the system working exactly as designed.

The Flood Has Already Arrived

The language of crisis has become unavoidable when describing what is happening on streaming platforms. Deezer, the French streaming service that has been the most transparent about the scale of the problem, has published a series of reports documenting a trajectory that looks less like gradual change and more like exponential inundation. In January 2025, the platform received approximately 10,000 fully AI-generated tracks per day, representing 10 per cent of all uploads. By April, that figure had doubled to 20,000 daily tracks and 18 per cent of uploads. By September, it was 30,000 tracks and 28 per cent. By November, 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks were arriving every single day, accounting for 34 per cent of all music delivered to the service. By January 2026, the number had climbed to 60,000 daily tracks, roughly 39 per cent of total daily intake. And by April 2026, nearly 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks were being uploaded each day, around 44 per cent of all new music arriving on the platform and more than two million synthetic tracks every month. Over the course of 2025, Deezer detected and tagged more than 13.4 million AI-generated tracks on its platform.

Spotify has been less forthcoming with its own figures but has acknowledged the problem in operational terms. In September 2025, the company revealed it had removed more than 75 million “spammy tracks” from its platform over the preceding 12 months. It now categorises uploads into three tiers: human-created, AI-assisted, and fully AI-generated. The platform named protecting artist identity a priority, and in March 2026 launched Artist Profile Protection, giving artists a pre-release approval queue to combat AI-generated tracks being misattributed to real musicians.

The fraud dimension is significant. Deezer found that up to 85 per cent of streams on AI-generated tracks were fraudulent in 2025, compared to an overall streaming fraud rate of 8 per cent across its entire catalogue. The motive is straightforward: generate thousands of tracks at near-zero cost, use bot farms to inflate stream counts, and siphon royalty payments from a pool that would otherwise go to human artists. When Deezer detects stream manipulation, it excludes those streams from royalty payments, but detection is a perpetual arms race.

The case of the Velvet Sundown illustrates how far the deception can travel before it is caught. In June 2025, a band with no prior public existence released a debut album called “Floating on Echoes” on Spotify. The music sounded like a peer of the Eagles and Led Zeppelin, a warm, analogue-textured blend of folk rock and psychedelia. Within weeks, the band had accumulated over 1.4 million monthly listeners via a verified Spotify account. Their track “Dust on the Wind” reached number one on Spotify's daily Viral 50 in Britain, Norway, and Sweden. It was only after Reddit users began investigating the band's curiously absent biographical details that a representative confirmed to Rolling Stone that the Velvet Sundown was created using Suno. The band's Spotify bio was quietly updated to describe it as “a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”

Roberto Neri, CEO of the Ivors Academy, warned that AI-generated bands like the Velvet Sundown, reaching large audiences without involving human creators, raise “serious concerns around transparency, authorship and consent.” The incident exposed what many in the industry had feared: that AI-generated music could not only pass as human but could build genuine fanbases before anyone thought to ask whether a human being had been involved at all.

The Aura Problem

In 1935, the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote what remains perhaps the most prescient essay on what happens to art when reproduction becomes frictionless. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” argued that every artwork possesses an “aura,” a quality bound to its unique existence in time and space, its history, its provenance, and the ritual context in which it was created. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element,” Benjamin wrote. “Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Mechanical reproduction, he argued, detaches the artwork from this context, substituting quantity for quality and exhibition value for cult value.

Benjamin was writing about photography and film. Nearly a century later, his framework maps onto AI-generated music with uncomfortable precision. If the aura of a work of art derives partly from the knowledge that a specific human being laboured to bring it into existence, that they made choices, overcame limitations, and embedded something of their lived experience into the work, then what happens when the labour disappears entirely? When the choices are delegated to a statistical model trained on the patterns of millions of prior works? When the limitation was merely not having opened an app yet?

The traditional pathway into music involved what might be called a filtration process built on friction. You learned an instrument. You studied song structure. You developed an ear over years of listening and playing. You made terrible music for a long time before making passable music, and passable music for even longer before making good music. This process did not merely produce technically proficient musicians. It produced people with knowledge, perspective, and something to say, artists who had been filtered by their own commitment and the inherent difficulty of the craft. The effort was not incidental to the art. It was constitutive of it.

This is the assumption that AI music tools are now dissolving. When someone with no musical background can generate a polished track in under a minute, the effort that historically served as a proxy for seriousness, for having earned the right to be heard, evaporates. And with it evaporates a set of cultural heuristics that listeners, critics, and the industry itself have relied upon for generations to distinguish signal from noise.

What the Listeners Say They Want

The data on listener attitudes reveals a population caught between what they experience and what they believe they should value. The Deezer-Ipsos survey found that while 66 per cent of music streaming users said they would listen to fully AI-generated music at least once out of curiosity, 45 per cent said they would like it filtered out of their streaming service, and 40 per cent said they would simply skip it without listening. Eighty per cent agreed that fully AI-generated music should be clearly labelled, and 73 per cent said they want to know if their streaming platform is recommending synthetic tracks. Sixty-nine per cent agreed that royalty payouts for fully AI-generated music should be lower than for human-made music. Seventy-three per cent of respondents believed it is unethical to use copyrighted material to generate new artificial music without permission from the original artists.

The British Phonographic Industry reached similar conclusions closer to home. Its “All About the Music 2025” survey of more than 1,750 UK consumers found that 80.1 per cent said human-made music is more valuable to them than AI-generated music, 81.5 per cent believe music generated solely by AI should be clearly labelled, and 82.7 per cent agreed that human creativity is essential to music. The pattern is a public that prizes the human story behind a song and wants the synthetic clearly marked apart from it, even as the sound itself becomes ever harder to tell apart.

Researchers have documented a phenomenon known as algorithm aversion in this context. Studies find that audiences consistently rate music less favourably once informed of AI authorship, even when the same piece was rated positively in a blind test. A 2025 preprint adds a caveat: this devaluation appears to be substantially mediated by listeners' pre-existing attitudes toward AI, rather than a clean, unconditional effect of authorship itself. Even so, the broader pattern holds. The perception of human effort and intentionality is not merely a contextual bonus but, for many listeners, a constitutive element of how they experience music as meaningful. The knowledge that a person struggled, chose, and cared does not just add value to the listening experience. For many listeners, it is the listening experience.

And yet, 97 per cent of those same listeners could not tell the difference. This is the paradox at the heart of the entire debate. People say they value human-made music. They say they want labels and filters and lower payouts for AI tracks. But when the labels are removed and the music stands on its own, nearly everyone is fooled. The question this raises is whether the value listeners place on human authorship is a genuine aesthetic preference or a social construction, a story people tell themselves about what matters because the alternative is too disorienting to contemplate.

The Industry Scrambles for Ground Rules

The institutional responses have been varied, reflecting an industry that recognises the magnitude of the shift but cannot agree on whether it represents a threat to be contained or an opportunity to be managed.

Deezer has taken the most aggressive stance among streaming platforms. It became the first major streaming service to explicitly tag AI-generated music in June 2025 and automatically removes fully AI-generated songs from algorithmic recommendations and editorial playlists. The company has developed an AI detection tool that it now sells to other companies, including Billboard, which uses it to determine which tracks in its charts are AI-generated.

In November 2025, iHeartMedia became the first major US radio group to codify its position against AI-generated content with its “Guaranteed Human” programme. An internal memo from Chief Programming Officer Tom Poleman established a formal directive: every voice heard on iHeart stations must be human. DJs must now include a line in their hourly legal IDs affirming that they are “Guaranteed Human.” The initiative bans AI-generated songs, AI disc jockeys, AI callers, and digital avatars from all its radio stations and podcasts. The company cited research indicating that roughly nine in ten consumers want the media they consume to be created by a real person, that 92 per cent say nothing can replace human connection, and that a similar share believe human trust cannot be replicated by AI.

The Recording Academy has attempted to navigate a middle path. CEO Harvey Mason Jr. has described the challenge of AI as “the toughest part of my job,” noting that he represents 40,000 Academy members trying to determine the right position. The Academy adjusted Grammy eligibility rules to permit the use of AI production tools whilst maintaining that Grammys will “continue to honour human creatives” and will not be “giving Grammys to AI artists or AI written songs.” Mason has said that “every” songwriter and producer he knows is now using AI in the studio in some capacity, citing artists including Pusha T, Charlie Puth, Teddy Swims, and Timbaland as public examples. In a March 2025 TED talk, Mason offered what he called a “survival guide” for human creators in the age of AI.

The legal landscape has shifted with remarkable speed. In January 2025, the US Copyright Office released a report concluding that works generated by AI based solely on text prompts are not protected under current copyright law, regardless of the complexity of the prompt. A federal appeals court affirmed this position in March 2025, ruling in Thaler v. Perlmutter that human authorship is a “bedrock requirement” for copyright registration. On 2 March 2026, the US Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler's appeal, leaving the human-authorship requirement as settled law. The practical implication is stark: the millions of tracks generated daily on Suno and Udio exist in a legal grey zone where their creators may have no intellectual property protections at all.

Meanwhile, the major labels have pursued a dual strategy of litigation and partnership that would be incoherent in any other industry. In June 2024, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filed aggressive copyright lawsuits against both Suno and Udio, alleging that the platforms trained their models on copyrighted recordings without permission. But by October 2025, Universal had settled with Udio and announced a partnership. Warner Music Group settled with both Suno and Udio in November 2025 and signed licensing deals allowing the platforms to build future models using its catalogue. Sony and Universal's lawsuits against Suno remain active; UMG-Suno licensing talks reportedly stalled in spring 2026, and a pivotal fair-use ruling in the Sony cases is anticipated later in 2026.

Spencer Kornhaber, writing in The Atlantic, captured the dissonance of this moment in a piece titled “AI Is Democratizing Music. Unfortunately.” The case against AI music feels, to many, intuitive, he argued, but the implications of its popularity are much bigger than a few more cringe songs. The technology is warping the record industry in strange and foreboding ways, blurring the line between democratisation and degradation.

When Proficiency Stops Meaning Anything

For most of recorded music history, technical proficiency served as a reliable signal. A guitarist who could play complex chord voicings was assumed to have something to say. A vocalist with a distinctive timbre was presumed to have earned it through years of practice and performance. A producer who could achieve a particular sonic texture was credited with knowledge and taste that took time to acquire. These assumptions were never perfectly correlated with artistic merit, but they provided a rough sorting mechanism that helped listeners, labels, and critics allocate attention in a world of finite output.

That sorting mechanism is now broken. When AI can generate technically flawless guitar work, pitch-perfect vocals, and commercially polished production in seconds, technical proficiency ceases to function as a proxy for anything. It reveals nothing about the creator's knowledge, commitment, or artistic vision. It is simply a default output of the system.

This is not entirely unprecedented. The history of music technology is, in many ways, a history of lowered barriers. The electric guitar democratised volume. The synthesiser democratised sonic texture. The drum machine democratised rhythm. The digital audio workstation democratised production. Auto-Tune democratised pitch. At each stage, gatekeepers warned that the removal of a technical barrier would diminish the art form, and at each stage, the art form not only survived but expanded in directions no one had anticipated. Punk rock was a direct response to the perceived elitism of progressive rock. Hip-hop was born from repurposing existing recordings in ways the original creators never intended. Electronic music was built on machines that traditional musicians initially dismissed as toys.

But there is a qualitative difference between lowering a barrier and eliminating it entirely. Previous technologies reduced the effort required to achieve specific musical effects whilst still demanding substantial skill, creativity, and intentionality from the human operator. A drum machine freed a producer from needing a live drummer but still required the producer to programme patterns, make rhythmic choices, and integrate those choices into a larger creative vision. AI music generation reduces the human contribution to a text prompt. The difference is not one of degree but of kind.

The question this raises for the broader culture is whether effort and struggle are necessary conditions for artistic legitimacy or merely historical accidents, contingent features of a technological landscape that happened to make music creation difficult. If a song makes a listener feel something, does it matter whether a human being suffered to create it? If the emotional response is indistinguishable, is the insistence on human authorship a genuine aesthetic principle or a form of nostalgia dressed up as philosophy?

The Scarcity That Made Us Care

There is a compelling argument that scarcity itself has always been the hidden engine of cultural value in music. Not artificial scarcity of the kind imposed by record labels and streaming algorithms, but the natural scarcity that arises from the simple fact that creating good music is hard. It takes time. It requires talent, which is unequally distributed. It demands persistence through years of mediocrity. The result is that, historically, the supply of genuinely compelling music has always been limited relative to the demand for it. This scarcity gave music its weight. It made the discovery of a great new artist feel like an event. It made the relationship between artist and listener feel like something earned on both sides.

AI music generation threatens to dissolve this scarcity entirely. When 7 million tracks are generated on a single platform in a single day, the supply of technically acceptable music becomes essentially infinite. And when supply becomes infinite, the economics of attention shift in ways that disadvantage human creators. Algorithms optimise for engagement, not for the conditions under which a piece of music was created. A track that holds a listener's attention for three minutes generates the same revenue whether it was produced by a human artist over six months or by an algorithm in 22 seconds.

This is the dynamic that Deezer's data illuminates from the opposite direction. By April 2026, AI-generated tracks made up around 44 per cent of all uploads to the platform, yet they remained a small fraction of what people actually played: Deezer reported AI consumption in the low single digits, roughly 1 to 3 per cent of total streams. This suggests that, at least for now, the market is performing a kind of organic filtration, that listeners are gravitating toward human-made music even without explicit labels. But this filtration depends on the current ratio of AI to human content and on the current state of detection and labelling. As AI music improves and its volume increases, the question is whether this natural sorting will hold or whether the sheer weight of synthetic content will eventually overwhelm it.

The deeper concern is not that AI music will replace human music in listener preferences but that it will dilute the ecosystem to the point where human music becomes harder to find, harder to monetise, and harder to justify as a career. If the ocean of content grows tenfold while the pool of listener attention remains constant, the per-stream economics for every creator, human or otherwise, deteriorate. The musicians who can least afford this deterioration are precisely the independent and emerging artists who have always depended on streaming platforms as their primary route to an audience.

Redefining What Counts

If technical proficiency and market scarcity no longer serve as credible proxies for artistic legitimacy, what replaces them? Several possibilities are emerging, though none has yet consolidated into a new consensus.

The first is provenance as value. In this model, the identity and story of the creator become the primary markers of worth. Music made by a specific human being, with a documented history, a visible creative process, and a relationship with an audience built over time, commands a premium precisely because it can be traced to a real life. This is essentially what iHeartMedia's “Guaranteed Human” programme is betting on, and it aligns with the consumer sentiment captured by Deezer and the BPI: most listeners say they value human-made music more highly and want synthetic tracks clearly labelled. It represents a shift from evaluating music on the basis of what it sounds like to evaluating it on the basis of where it came from.

The second is liveness as legitimacy. If studio recordings become indistinguishable from AI output, the live performance becomes the last irreducible proof of human artistry. A person standing on a stage, singing and playing in real time, cannot be faked. Or at least not yet. This may explain why live music revenues have continued to climb even as recorded music enters a period of profound uncertainty. The concert becomes not just entertainment but verification, a demonstration of authenticity in a world where recordings can no longer provide it.

The third is curation as craft. In a world of infinite content, the ability to find, contextualise, and present music becomes a form of artistry in itself. Playlist curators, radio hosts, music journalists, and community tastemakers may assume a role analogous to art gallery directors, their selections conferring value not because of what the music sounds like in isolation but because of the context and intentionality of the presentation.

The fourth, and perhaps most radical, is the abandonment of authenticity as a relevant criterion altogether. In this view, the insistence that music must come from human suffering to be valuable is itself a form of gatekeeping, a Romantic-era ideology that has been selectively applied to protect incumbent interests. If people enjoy AI-generated music, this argument goes, then it has value, full stop. The philosopher's insistence on human authorship is no more defensible than the classical purist's insistence that electronic music is not real music.

Each of these frameworks has adherents, and none is likely to triumph completely. What seems more probable is a fragmentation, a cultural landscape in which different communities and platforms adopt different standards of value, and in which the question “Is this real music?” yields different answers depending on whom you ask.

The Recording That Knows It Is Being Recorded

Harvey Mason Jr. has described himself as “optimistic but scared” about AI's impact on the music industry. That formulation captures something essential about this moment. The optimism is real: AI tools have the potential to democratise music creation in ways that empower people who were previously excluded by the cost and complexity of traditional production. The fear is equally real: that democratisation, taken to its logical extreme, may produce a landscape in which the very concept of musical achievement loses its meaning.

The US Copyright Office's determination that purely AI-generated works cannot receive copyright protection introduces an additional wrinkle, one now reinforced by the Supreme Court's refusal in March 2026 to revisit the question. If the millions of tracks created daily on Suno and Udio have no legal intellectual property protections, they exist in a peculiar liminal space: culturally present but legally unprotected, commercially available but not commercially ownable. This may, paradoxically, reinforce the value of human-created music by creating a legal distinction that the ears alone cannot make. Copyright becomes not just a legal protection but a certificate of human origin.

What remains uncertain is whether any of these adaptations will be sufficient to preserve the economic conditions under which human musicianship can sustain a career. A projection from Sonarworks, an audio-software company, suggests AI-generated content could overtake human content in volume within roughly five years in an accelerated scenario, or about a decade in its base case. A December 2024 global economic study by CISAC and PMP Strategy estimated that music creators could lose up to 24 per cent of their revenue by 2028 for want of protections against AI competition, a cumulative loss of some €10 billion over five years. These are projections, not certainties, but they describe a plausible trajectory in which the lived experience of being a professional musician becomes increasingly untenable for all but the most established artists.

The Recording Academy's Human Artistry Campaign, Tennessee's ELVIS Act protecting artists' voices and likenesses, and the bipartisan NO FAKES Act represent legislative attempts to create guardrails. The NO FAKES Act has not yet passed; it remains pending in committee and was reintroduced in May 2026 as the NO FAKES Act of 2026, with new exemptions for libraries and researchers. But legislation moves slowly, and the technology does not.

The Sound of Something That Was Never Felt

In the end, the question AI-generated music poses is not really about music at all. It is about what happens when any form of human expression can be simulated at scale, when the observable output of creativity can be reproduced without the internal experience that traditionally gave it meaning. Music has always been valued not merely as sound but as evidence of human feeling, as proof that someone, somewhere, felt something strongly enough to shape it into a form that others could share. The effort was part of the message. The struggle was part of the song.

When that evidentiary chain is broken, when the sound persists but the feeling behind it was never there, we are left with a philosophical question that no amount of data can resolve. Is the beauty in the sound itself, or in the knowledge that a human being made it? Is the value in the experience of listening, or in the story of creation? And if we cannot tell the difference, does the difference still matter?

The 97 per cent who could not distinguish AI from human in a blind test already have their answer, even if they do not yet know it. The 80 per cent who say they value human-made music more are clinging to a different answer, one rooted not in perception but in principle. Both answers are honest. Both are incomplete. And the space between them is where the future of music will be negotiated, one stream, one song, one difficult question at a time.

References and Sources

1. Suno platform statistics: 100 million users, 7 million daily generations, $250 million Series C, $2.45 billion valuation, and roughly $300 million in annual recurring revenue. Business of Apps, “Suno Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026).” https://www.businessofapps.com/data/suno-statistics/
2. Deezer and Ipsos survey of 9,000 respondents across eight countries finding 97 per cent could not distinguish AI from human music, alongside listener attitudes on labelling, filtering and royalty payouts. Deezer Newsroom, November 2025. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/11/deezer-ipsos-survey-ai-music/
3. Deezer AI upload statistics: 10,000 daily tracks in January 2025 (10 per cent), rising to 18 per cent by April and 30,000 (28 per cent) by September 2025. Deezer Newsroom, September 2025. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/09/28-fully-ai-generated-music/
4. Deezer January 2026 update: 60,000 daily AI tracks, 13.4 million AI tracks detected in 2025, up to 85 per cent of AI streams fraudulent against an 8 per cent overall fraud rate, demonetisation of fraudulent streams, and the sale of Deezer's AI-detection tool (used by Billboard). Deezer Newsroom, January 2026. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/01/ai-generated-music-deezer-selling-detection-tool/
5. Deezer April 2026 update: nearly 75,000 AI tracks uploaded per day, around 44 per cent of new uploads, more than two million synthetic tracks per month, the full upload-volume timeline, 13.4 million tracks detected in 2025, up to 85 per cent of AI streams fraudulent and demonetised, and AI consumption at roughly 1 to 3 per cent of total streams. Deezer Newsroom, April 2026. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/04/ai-generated-tracks-represent-44-of-new-uploaded-music/
6. Spotify removal of 75 million spammy tracks and new three-tier AI categorisation policy. Music Ally, September 2025. https://musically.com/2025/09/25/spotify-reveals-its-latest-measures-to-handle-ai-music/
7. Spotify launch of Artist Profile Protection to stop AI tracks being misattributed to real artists. TechCrunch, March 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/24/spotify-tests-new-tool-to-stop-ai-slop-from-being-attributed-to-real-artists/
8. Breaking Rust “Walk My Walk” topping Spotify Viral 50 USA and Billboard Country Digital Song Sales (with context on its low sales volume and absence from main streaming charts), and the broader AI music litigation timeline covering UMG and Sony lawsuits against Suno and Udio and the Warner Music settlements. Billboard, 2025. https://www.billboard.com/lists/biggest-ai-music-stories-2025-suno-udio-charts-more/
9. The Velvet Sundown confirmed to a representative as an AI project created using Suno. Rolling Stone, 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/velvet-sundown-ai-band-suno-1235377652/
10. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). Available at MIT: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
11. BPI “All About the Music 2025” survey of 1,750+ UK consumers: 80.1 per cent value human-made music more, 81.5 per cent want AI music clearly labelled, 82.7 per cent agree human creativity is essential. The BPI, 2025. https://www.bpi.co.uk/news-analysis/new-survey-reveals-uk-fans-want-greater-transparency-over-ai-generated-music
12. Algorithm aversion and the mediating role of pre-existing attitudes toward AI in perceptions of AI-generated music. arXiv preprint, December 2025. https://arxiv.org/html/2512.02785v1
13. iHeartMedia “Guaranteed Human” programme banning AI-generated content, including the legal-ID requirement, Tom Poleman's memo, and the supporting consumer research that roughly nine in ten consumers want media made by real people and 92 per cent say nothing replaces human connection. Billboard, November 2025. https://www.billboard.com/pro/iheartradio-bans-ai-music-podcasts-radio-djs-new-program/
14. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. on AI as “the toughest part of my job,” representing 40,000 members, noting that every songwriter and producer he knows uses AI, and the adjusted Grammy eligibility rules. Billboard, 2025. https://www.billboard.com/music/awards/grammy-ai-harvey-mason-jr-recording-academy-1236126346/
15. US Copyright Office report on copyrightability of AI-generated works, concluding that outputs generated solely from text prompts are not protected. US Copyright Office, January 2025. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/
16. Federal appeals court ruling in Thaler v. Perlmutter affirming human authorship requirement. CNBC, March 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/ai-art-cannot-be-copyrighted-appeals-court-rules.html
17. US Supreme Court denial of certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, 2 March 2026, leaving the human-authorship requirement intact. Reed Smith, March 2026. https://www.reedsmith.com/our-insights/blogs/viewpoints/102mlpl/supreme-court-denies-certiorari-in-thaler-v-perlmutter-human-only-rule-for-ai/
18. UMG and Suno settlement talks reaching an impasse in spring 2026. Digital Music News, April 2026. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/04/09/suno-universal-music-lawsuit-settlement-impasse/
19. Spencer Kornhaber, “AI Is Democratizing Music. Unfortunately.” The Atlantic, December 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/12/ai-music-suno-warner-bros/685331/
20. Roberto Neri, CEO of the Ivors Academy, on Velvet Sundown raising “serious concerns around transparency, authorship and consent,” and the band approaching 1.4 million monthly Spotify listeners. RouteNote, 2025. https://routenote.com/blog/music-industry-calls-for-greater-ai-transparency-from-dsps-after-the-velvet-sundown-controversy/
21. Sonarworks projection that AI-generated content could overtake human content within roughly five to ten years, from the company's CEO keynote on AI in music. Sonarworks Blog, 2025. https://www.sonarworks.com/blog/research/ceo-keynote-ai-in-the-music-industry-2025
22. CISAC and PMP Strategy global economic study estimating generative AI could put 24 per cent of music creators' revenues at risk by 2028. CISAC, December 2024. https://www.cisac.org/Newsroom/news-releases/global-economic-study-shows-human-creators-future-risk-generative-ai
23. Tennessee ELVIS Act protecting artists' voices and likenesses. Recording Academy advocacy. https://www.recordingacademy.com/advocacy/news/tennessee-victory-bill-lee-elvis-act
24. NO FAKES Act reintroduced in May 2026 as the NO FAKES Act of 2026, with new library and researcher exemptions; remains pending. IPWatchdog, May 2026. https://ipwatchdog.com/2026/05/20/no-fakes-reintroduced-with-more-protections-for-libraries-and-researchers/
25. Human Artistry Campaign principles for responsible AI in music. https://www.humanartistrycampaign.com

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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In Summary: * Major accomplishment today was spending an hour midday clearing out some major weed/bushes from the front of the house and stuffing the cut foliage into the big green organics bin which I then wheeled out to the front curb for collection tomorrow morning.

Listening now to the Texas Rangers Pregame Show ahead of tonight's game vs the KC Royals. I'll finish the night prayers while listening to the game, then head to bed afterwards.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 235.90 lbs * bp= 152/90 (67)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises

Diet: * 05:40 – 1 banana, 1 pb&j sandwich * 09:00 – cookies * 10:10 – 1 seafood salad and cheese sandwich * 11:00 – fried chicken, cut green beans, whole kernel corn * 13:00 – biscuit and jam, scrambled eggs, sausage, pancakes * 17:30 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:05 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 12:00 – yard work * 13:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * !4:00 – nap * 15:00 – listen to the Jack Riccardi Show * 17:00 – listen to 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, ahead of tonight's Rangers game.

Chess: * 11:16 – moved in all pending CC games

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Water In The Distance

Far to winning floes The living have a dream And here this night we ran And saw stupor in its frame The chance of our affair To yesterday the whole of place in pond And distance from our rest In time forgive and known unto Place to be far and shore And occupant of still These duly soldiers walk in pain But willing on in peace and at this year We bless and blame the star of our accord Might and force to these seams we are at head Made to strife and current stop reune The place at night is war,- at staccato effect we earn and seasontide our press- who stand for shoals and making some unblame The showstop in her way as clock to distance on the march,- and to get wet this morning at the chill we know of Heaven And in our last benediction came ruin And vices then and for the distance Ruin and ruin of dengue with the specious drop of turns in blood And as it was November,- we stayed and wept at war and for the wretched Seeding home and curve to know our end of nights This year of us in mourning to our sons and crystal babes- denied as children in our grasp to light the dawn and let us rise The hearts unbeared to see This happenstance of then And when we walk to her, this spring of chance We’ll walk away the water until it burns,- and we will pass like many River making never and proud at touch of presence God in Heaven, refill this aquifer in Jesus Christ,- and let us borrow one more crutch- Waiting for the crops til Winter void and beings hush so far among your grace Favours for unto to let all things be relief and knowing pain together,- wonder war and good pursuit to sell us rain Thoughts of Heaven and before This God of Water aching to our being Tide to never rising But at once a soul as this- greatest storm from Holy strength And I object to Never as that flight at one that tried to burn us all- and rather Sun to our better day This tiny ditch, Apostles’ Creek And we’ll imbibe forever to the distance, hanging near And empty hands will falter Jettison this funeral, Distance May Our need for free esteem and to that well, our new obsession- One hundred percent and to our laws this tiny poem for best ahead- and neighbours feeling fine And all who dressed to Bethlehem We have spoken to the dark and sky of rain Our path will show the ruin for God to see And all our prayers renew- Our victim souls.

HIV

Into the scrape of death,- I sorted things to see And what went into, hiding This understudy and moral ratchet The year of pestilence untidy And who and wonder and her The day of prayer in socket And life as sober, ending well The sky pressed into my hand And heart and please The shoal of weapons, sky Inpostuous ruin and little things Like a day without her to remind In bearing Bread and life beautiful- as much as a husband provides And in this day for reasoning and sense,- I pocketed two of Rome For in there lives a body within To the beautiful and greatest I know And sunset no, for her problem And this difficult repeat for its place Tectonic to nine and moral bits to be home There was nothing left but surrender And to this day of Andrew and knowing where- But what of my esteem am I friending To seasons betold and maybe betrayed I was poor or maybe then not For four duly nights distracted I wished imperil for all for two seconds And knowing the whole of us to muster in truth The days of abandon are done.

Mangrove

To the forest I saw the deep Afraid at Kingdom night These special hearts would glow Fifteen years and sparkle gem Afraid to know Time’s repeating right The missing in St. Pattern to call mine Dust in gravity And what a cube is for Water lively says Come in A hold for just a minute Time away from keeps in our bateau Somebody has seen us Our right and left to dip Hands sliding and our go To beautiful and best The years of now forever The current, every star Dip in remand and shaking,- With purpose, we hide our breath These trees across to line the East In musted deep We sobbed at wild grasses And nurtured within our best Days of in this wall and fitting gently Under the forest Fire as our light But at sleep and so due The timeless match, our Water And I met, anew A simple and organic- Fed to the original- Our guess Beknighting future This our way of war To us lay henge And putting back for Heaven The road and only Communion in our hand And facing West,- we know Philosophy is lost And we will fly Dates of year and one Christmas and alone But see the Earth and why Crescent cherished Moon Spike our glow and let us in Purchased all corrections And silent to God Made for giving This chapter of You, Father Giving us back our time- and water of life Made for shepherd-breathing Finding forever Christ in our path And way to make His room A mangrove flow- free and hope to all men And to yours.

Tonight I choose to listen to a MLB Game: my Texas Rangers vs the KC Royals. The game is scheduled to start at 6:40 PM CDT. I'll tune into 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports station, early to listen to pregame coverage, and I'll stay with this station for the radio call of the game.

And the adventure continues

Having had interesting conversations with various friends has made me in a great mood as i lie here atop the bed in my underwear with my dogs nearby

I had my picture taken today for the access card. When I saw the lunatic grinning back at me — from a red and bloated face with a wild beard and asymmetrical nose which has a tint of red just like the beard — on the screen

The lady asked me if I was happy with the picture, I just shrugged and said well I look like that

I used to be handsome and now I look like a that,

it’s my face

It looks like that

I like it, it’s mine

And I have been speaking about stuff from deep within with my friends, I showed them the kintsugi vase I am making of myself, and thus vulnerable, they help me put the pieces back together

Again

Because I value my kindness and have opted to try to keep this side of myself

Because without it, I am not sure who I would be

But still, this time it’ll be darker

There’s no helping it

And the temperature is mild, the dogs are mild, and the moon is somewhere up there in the sky

I am the luckiest man I know

Today didn’t follow anything I planned, but that’s becoming normal. The day came in loud, someone entering like they owned the air in the room, uncalled for, calling my name too sharply for how early it felt. I don’t even remember what they needed. Just the disruption of it stayed behind. That noise stuck in my head. Disgusting. After that, everything felt slightly off rhythm. Like I was responding to things a second too late, but still getting them right enough that nobody noticed.

I thought I’d bake when I got home. Something simple to keep my misery away. I didn’t. Not the chef of today’s episode. Walked away. I’m not as drained as I used to be, which is strange. I feel steady. And I’m not going to apologize for not writing for a few days, it’s my notes. And I’ll disappear whenever I do. Just things have changed now. There was a time not long ago when nights ended differently. When the silence felt heavier, and numbing it seemed like the only way to keep it from echoing. Alcohol, cigarettes used to sit somewhere in that space, not as a solution, just as something that blurred the edges enough to get through. But that isn’t where things are now. Something changed the direction of that pattern before it could repeat itself. It feels like an interruption (not really). almost like a presence that steps in right when everything starts leaning toward disappearing into my old habits again, just enough to pull me back into the room. Like an angel, if I let myself use that word without overthinking it. Not something dramatic, just something that arrives at the moment things start slipping and doesn’t let them fall all the way.

Just. in the way something can appear right on time and make me pause before I disappear into an old habit again. And maybe that’s enough. For now, I just notice that I’m still here, and the night doesn’t feel like something I need to escape from.

P.S. I wrote that earlier this day, its past midnight. I might be an overthinker a fool. part of me still thinks this is a trap or some delayed consequence finally catching up to me in a prettier form. angel, maybe I am being used, maybe i am being fooled, maybe one day i'll find out i understood everything completely wrong. but even so. None of those thoughts seems strong enough to stop it. my heart keeps returning anyway. it yearns. and yearns. completely uninterested in whatever concerns my brain keeps raising. im afraid im the fool one in this new story of mine.

Sincerely, A fool losing every argument with his own thoughts.

Ahmed

I’m a bike commuter, and I think ghost bikes are counterproductive.

Most of you will probably not know what a ghost bike is, so here goes: when someone is killed on their bike, bike advocates will often paint a bike white and lock it to something at the scene of the crash to memorialize the dead and to draw attention to the shortage of good bike infrastructure.

Most people, as I said, have no idea what ghost bikes are about, so if the intent is to make a statement to the wider community, I don’t think it’s succeeding. But also—I don’t think the presence of a ghost bike helps change the behavior of car drivers. In the unlikely event that they know what it means, they’ll doubtless think the bike had it coming because that’s how it’s always reported when people in cars kill people on bikes.

But of course we don’t have ghost people at the site of pedestrian fatalities (at least not ones we can see) nor ghost cars where fatal car crashes have happened. So the presence of ghost bikes gives the impression that biking is a uniquely dangerous mode of transportation. This, of course, isn’t true, but also it discourages people from biking, and the more people who bike, the safer it is to bike.

So, yeah, like I said. Counterproductive.

Also? Waste of a good bike.

Викторија Стојовска – Биографија

Викторија Стојовска е македонска авторка, поетеса и блогерка од Кичево. Активно твори повеќе години, градејќи препознатлив литературен израз кој се одликува со искреност, емотивна длабочина и силна поврзаност со човечките чувства.

Нејзиното творештво опфаќа поезија, проза, кратки приказни, колумни и новели. Во своите дела ги истражува темите на љубовта, загубата, надежта, личното созревање, внатрешните борби и потрагата по сопствениот идентитет. Нејзините текстови се инспирирани од реални животни искуства, лични емоции и приказни кои оставаат трага во човековата душа.

Активен член е на Литературниот клуб „Китка“ од Кичево и учесник на бројни литературни манифестации, конкурси и културни настани, каде има освоено повеќе награди и признанија за своето творештво.

Во 2020 година го отвора својот литературен блог, преку кој редовно ја споделува својата поезија и проза со читателите, создавајќи препознатлива читателска публика.

Нејзина прва објавена книга е „Парчиња од себеси“, дело составено од кратки приказни, прозни записи и дијалози инспирирани од реалноста и човечките емоции. Книгата е дел од едицијата „Книжевни меридијани“ во рамките на современата македонска книжевност и е добитник на наградата „Душата на чаршијата“.

По неа следуваат делата „Своја“ и „Куклата од театарот“, книги во кои авторката продолжува да ги истражува најдлабоките човечки чувства, љубовта, загубата, женската сила и процесот на лична трансформација.

Она што ја издвојува Викторија Стојовска е нејзиниот препознатлив стил директен, искрен и емотивен. Нејзините текстови допираат до читателот преку едноставноста на изразот и длабочината на чувствата, оставајќи простор секој да пронајде дел од сопствената приказна во нејзините зборови.

Издадени дела: • „Парчиња од себеси“ • „Своја“ • „Куклата од театарот“

Е- книги • „Нејзините чувства “

„Пишувам за она што боли, лекува, останува и живее во нас долго откако ќе помине.“

Hello again. I hope your week is going well.

After POTUS declared that he didn't care about the financial struggles of the American people, he has now declared “I love the inflation.” POTUS doesn't care about the country he is responsible for. As long as a problem doesn't touch him personally, he doesn't care who is having problems, and he doesn't care how badly those problems affect the people.

Again and again POTUS has proven that he is unfit for the office he holds. He needs to be removed from office as soon as possible. The people need to let congress know they must do their job and get rid of this incompetent person. It is the only way to save the nation from further problems.

POTUS Roaster

Thanks for reading my posts. If you want to see the rest of them, please go to write.as/potusroaster/archive/

To email us send it too potusroaster@gmail.com

Please tell your family, friends and neighbors about the posts.

The broken system we have to endure only continues to stagger on because the majority of people have yet to withdraw their consent. That sounds like I'm going to condemn the majority for continuing to go along with a system that doesn’t reflect our desire for a better, more meaningful existence doesn't it? Well, I'm not going to condemn people for appearing to go along with a dysfunctional, increasingly dystopian system because that's not my style.

With the way things have been set up, the vast majority of people are too busy slogging their guts out trying to make ends meet to build whatever life they can manage in a failing system. After an exhausting week, understandably all they want to do with whatever downtime they may have is to try and chill out as far as possible between all of the life admin and other crap that's part and parcel of modern life. What gets me is those people who claim to have 'woken up' calling out everyone else for being so called 'sheep' and ‘normies’. That's the kind of elitist crap that gets me riled up.

In the years since the Covid 'crisis' broke, a decent number of people have become more alert to what's being done to them in the name of the 'Great Reset' and why it's being done to them. Not all of them saw through things at the outset. It took me a few months before the pieces started to fall into place and I could start to see through the narrative I was being fed. Some are only just realising now what was actually done to us. People will come to see things at different paces and in different ways. Those who claimed to see through the narrative from day one and who roundly condemned those who didn't, need to take a long hard look at themselves.

One of the reasons why this is the case is that what some dubbed the 'freedom' or 'truth' movement was never really a cohesive enterprise. If anything it was an uneasy coalition of convenience for a fairly wide range of people. One that was never destined to last. So, it shouldn't come as any surprise that the messaging from those of us opposing what has been done to us over the last few years wasn’t exactly clear or consistent. Such is life. It's down to those of us with a platform to work out how we can communicate the need for the crumbling system we have to be replaced from the grassroots upwards with something that meets our needs on our terms. It's also important to do so without hectoring or preaching. This is not an easy task!

If you talk to most people in depth, they'll most likely admit they know things are falling apart at the seams and that it's harder to trust those in authority to look after their interests. What they don't feel confident about is how to set about making a challenge and start to build something better. Given the daunting scale of the task, it's understandable that most people feel that all they can do is keep their heads down and hope for the best.

I haven't got a blueprint for how society could look after any radical change. Anyone coming along with a blueprint and a ready made plan for change needs to be treated with the utmost suspicion. All I have are some tentative suggestions and principles, based on an understanding that most ordinary people can be trusted to do the right thing. This is a work in progress and I don't claim to have a magic formula when it comes to succinctly communicating an idea that will make people stop and think, and then start to ask some awkward questions.

One thing I’m doing my level best to do is to encourage people to start quietly withdrawing their consent for the system to carry on functioning as it is. I recognise that most people's circumstances mean that they can't fully opt out and go off to live in a self sufficient community of like minded people. That's how things have been set up to ensure that we remain trapped in their shitshow of a system. That's what they want to think anyway...

Quietly withdrawing consent can involve a pretty wide range of actions, each of which has the potential to throw a small spanner in the works. When taken cumulatively, they can end up throwing a massive spanner in the works. It starts with getting out of the cycle of constantly upgrading and instead, making stuff last longer with an emphasis on repairing rather than replacing. Questioning whether you actually need all of the stuff that surrounds you is is next step. That involves reassessing priorities. Rather than sitting isolated at home glued to a screen, get together with friends and neighbours for face to face interaction and analogue amusements:) Taking control of at least some of your food supply by growing and processing it yourself is another way of breaking out from the system. Again, it's another endeavour that's better done in tandem with others as it will build strong, independent grassroots networks.

There's also growing resistance to the digitisation of ever more aspects of our lives from buying train tickets to the attempts to get us to abandon cash and pay for everything using so called smartphones. So, what to do? There are no easy answers to this. The bastards are digitising many aspects of our lives, making it harder and harder to live without an Internet connection, let alone a smartphone. A smartphone in our pockets that acts as a tether to what’s becoming a digital prison. If we ditch the smartphone and the Internet connection, the bastards have made damn sure that our lives will be very difficult indeed, if not impossible. They’ve engineered it like that so we find it harder and harder to escape the control grid they’re herding us into. Getting people addicted to the social media available on their smartphones is a part of the plan. This is something that as a self confessed, seventy year old Luddite, I feel strongly about and intend to explore in some depth in future pieces.

Then there’s the news agenda, or what passes for 'news' in the age of nudging, fear porn, divide and rule and full on psy-ops. It's an agenda designed to keep us in fear, hoping the authorities will come up with a solution to the hassle and shite of everyday life. When a fair number of those problems appear to be designed to generate a strong reaction followed up by a 'solution' from the authorities that will suit the interests of the powers that be while further diminishing our agency and freedom, it's time to withdraw our consent.

It's simply a case of refusing to view their crap while at the same time, seeking out independent reportage and commentary that’s concerned with the truth and open debate rather than garnering a massive amount of views and keeping us fearful and at each other's throats. Sadly, it needs to be noted that there are charlatans and massive egos circulating in alternative media circles so, discretion and critical thinking do need to be applied to ensure that you can trust what you’re reading.

As already stated, this is not a comprehensive list of ways people can start to quietly withdraw their consent from a toxic system. To come up with such a list would be arrogant. All I want to do with this piece is offer some pointers and get people to start the process of thinking how they can circumvent and undermine a system that's geared up to serve the elites and actively works against our hopes and aspirations. The more creative people can get with this, the better...

I’m alone in the half renovated apartment

The dogs were happy to see me and are now waiting for food.

We went out for a walk just before a whole rainy day’s worth of water fell down, I could see it and hear it through the window

A type of weather associated with doomsdays but now again the sun is shining

Just like that, a fit of rage from up above or something, then it’s like nothing happened, 

But the ground is wet

And i’m making food also for myself; I’m about to eat some stuff i’ve found in the freezer; an assortment of random food from all over the world

And I’ve got some tzatziki still

I ate for lunch too

I bet I smelt of garlic for my new colleagues

This amuses me somewhat

I did not think today would actually ever come. I thought the situation would change and the “last day” could be avoided. It feels weird not having control of the circumstances. I can’t tell if I feel relief or nervousness about potentially having to start over…

I have not thought about what to tell people when they ask why I am not working. I am sure I will come up with something vague, but I actually have to pack up my things now. That feels odd. I don’t feel like I am finished here, maybe I can come back once things clear up, but I am also curious about trying something new. I have so many ideas but I struggle with bringing them to fruition.

I definitely need to refocus on my health. My sleeping and eating habits are not good and are affecting me in more ways than just feeling tired or hungry. I have regained weight I had already lost and I am positive my cortisol levels have shot high. I need to take care of myself so that will be my first task.

I may not know what the next few weeks will bring, but at least I know what I can do in the meantime.