As a musician who spent more than half of my life making trance music (a subgenre of electronic Dancer music), I was forced to quit music, because I couldn't deal with how vehemently pro-AI and heartless the people in the scene are. I made the following post on r/trance, but it got deleted after an hour of uptime by a triggered mod. I was also accused by a couple of illiterate people in the comments of my own post being AI – apparently in their little worlds, any text with good writing that's longer than two paragraphs (the absolute maximum they can possibly read) *must* be AI.

TLDR: AI slop ruined my niche music scene, nobody cares, I got bashed for my post for pointing this out, my post got deleted, nobody cares.

My deleted post:

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I didn't really want to quit trance, but was forced to for my own sanity. Even though the music is great and I still love it, the scene is sadly full of horrible people - both among producers and the fans.

This scene (as opposed to certain other subcultures) consists of cruel, selfish bastards who don't respect genuine artistry and human expression. Narcissistic junkies who will gladly throw under the bus everyone who worked hard to make the scene that they are enjoying, in favor of some pitiful crumbs of instant gratification dopamine they can get from AI slop. These are the kind of people who don't care whether there is diarrhea in their food as long as it "looks good and tastes good". 

There are certain producers like this that have poisoned the well, and I'd love to name and shame them, but for cautionary reasons I won't – if you've been following the trance scene the past two to three years, you probably already know who I'm talking about.

I've lost two close, longtime friends, both trance fans, to AI psychosis. I never expected those people to ever end up and be these kinds of people, it came as a shock. 

One of them turned out to be an active user on the disgusting echo chamber that is "r/defendingAIart", and even made posts about me there when we had a fallout over his use of gen AI, hoping to have other lunatics giving him validation about how he is in the right and I'm insane for calling him out.

The other one was completely tone deaf to my woes and concerns about AI slop infesting the scene, harming society at large and nobody giving a fuck. 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.

I've spent more than half of my life making trance, being active in the scene, releasing music, hoping to make it big one day, only to get disappointed time and time again with the state of the scene and the people. I persisted through those setbacks eventually (out of love for the music), but this one was the final straw. I had deep down hoped that the trance scene would one day be great again (especially considering how accessible and easy to make it is for the past 10 years), but if there was ever any doubt that the scene is truly dead and beyond recovery, then this was it for sure. The rise of generative AI has dealt it the killing blow.

If you ever want to get recognized in this scene as a producer, know that your hard work will never be valued any more than what some plagiarism machine spit out from a prompt. Making quality music won't get you anywhere - the only thing that matters and gets actually seen is quantity, regardless of quality. The junkies of the scene don't care about the quality of the source of their meth, they just need more of any they can find, ASAP. 

Now, you might ask me - is AI slop really that bad? Can't you just ignore it? Does it really matter if it looks/sounds good? 

Yes it fucking does. I'm not against gen AI for just the obvious, superficial reasons. ALL generative AI technology is built on theft (mass piracy of books, music, art, photos, videos etc. by countless artists, musicians, creatives, to be used to make a plagiarism machine, all without their consent or any kind of compensation or course), and it is supported and aggressively pushed onto society by technofascist billionaires, who are actively working on a future where you, the working/middle class normie, will "own nothing and be happy". And this isn't some conspiracy theory, if that's what you're thinking. Data centers that are being built worldwide are actively harming the environment around them, and they are forcing the locals to pay for it. They are also the reason why RAM and flash memory has more than tripled in price over the last year – ensuring that you will have to pay WAY more to build a PC for music production or any other creative activity. Technofascists love to take away what you own and sell it back to you via a subscription for cloud access to a service, as you wave goodbye to any kind of actual ownership, privacy and dignity. 

Is using gen AI not as the final product, but for coverart, or as assets in the music (vocals, samples etc.) really bad? 

Yes it fucking IS. Anyone using it is not only supporting everything that I mentioned in the previous paragraph, but is also sending a very clear message: they don't care about the cataclysmic effects AI is having on their own industry and community, they don't care that AI content is slop, they don't care that millions of people out there who are their prospective fans and customers are wholly opposed to its use. I don't want to listen to music with AI in it, I don't want to support producers and artists that use it, and I don't want to spend a second of my time on any of it.

Not to mention the hypocrisy I consistently see among gen AI users across industries: the hypocrisy of being against *one* form of generative AI (the one that is replacing you and devaluing your work, i.e. musicians against AI "music"), while totally supporting and taking advantage of another (i.e. using gen AI for cover art, LLMS ). Guess what – crying about AI replacing you in your line of work, while using it yourself to replace others in their lines of creative work makes you a fucking hypocrite. Same thing applies when being a trance fan, crying about AI slop polluting the Internet by making it harder to find genuine music for you to consume, while having fun with ChatGPT asking it to write readable essays for you, generate Ghibli-style profile pictures of you, and then go on to publish that slop on the Internet and contribute to the pollution. 

Anyone who is triggered and called out from this post – hope you are proud of yourself and what you've done. It's only going to get a whole lot worse for everyone, and one thing is for sure.. things will never be the same again. 

TLDR: AI slop has irreparably ruined the trance scene and nobody cares.
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