September 24, 2025 • 35 mins
Lo-Fi beats once stood as the chill soundtrack of the internet, a cozy genre rooted in human touch and imperfections. But in recent years, AI-generated mixes have flooded platforms like YouTube, pumping out endless streams of eerily similar tracks that mimic the vibe, without the soul. What happens when the scene gets overtaken by AI? Dexter talks to Kieran Press-Reynolds, a writer at Pitchfork, about how AI is reshaping the genre, what that means for artists, and whether there is still room for the human touch in the age of AI-generated beats.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read + Watch:
Kieran’s article, “How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene”: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-ai-wreaked-havoc-on-the-lo-fi-beat-scene/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
It would be like the same few loops over and
over again, and there was a real like lack of
dynamism to them, but there's something kind of robotic about it.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Kieran press Reynolds is a columnist for Pitchfork. But while back,
he wrote an article about how AI is taking over
a specific genre of music, low fi beats.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
And theious videos were like hours long, and they'd either
have no song titles in the description, which is a
big red flag, or they would have timestamps with songs
the titles that were just saying nothing like they would
all be sort of like just seeming like generated nonsense.
So there are all these kind of clues that this
music something fishy is going on.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
You might not know lo fi by name, but you've
probably heard of before. It's usually part of these long
mixes on YouTube or Spotify. It's just kind of muffled
instrumental hip hop. It's inoffensive, it's calming. It kind of
sounds like you could play it in a coffee shop.
It kind of sounds like this, to be real with you,
(01:23):
low fi is not my favorite genre. I have a
love hate relationship with it at best. To me, a
lot of it's repetitive, it doesn't go anywhere, and a
lot of it just sounds the same, which would make
it a perfect target for AI. And the hardcore fans
are starting to freak.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Out, and I went to the Reddit page. More and
more people were posting like, what is this channel? This
looks sort of dodgy, and other people were like, oh
my god, the genre has become overrun. A lot of
these people really love the genre. But even they who
were like PhDs in the genre, they couldn't discern some
of this stuff. They were like, I have no idea
(02:02):
if it's a I like, the genre has been overrun
and now it's everywhere. A lot of people have almost
just given up. They've because they're the genre just like
a wasteland, Like it's over.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Maybe this doesn't sound like a big deal to you,
because maybe you don't listen to low fi. But what
if this is just a preview of what happens when
the robots come for your favorite genre. From Kaleidoscope and
iHeart Podcasts, this is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas, So
(02:46):
we're here to talk about lo fi hip hop? What
first got you into lo fi?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
I used to be really big on YouTube, and it
probably just like ambiently appeared on my feet or the
algorithm gave it to me. It was targeted for you
to like to study two to play video games too,
and it really grabbed me like a decade ago when
I heard it.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
So would you call yourself a low five fan? Then?
Speaker 1 (03:09):
I was definitely not like in the community back in
the day, but I was definitely into it, and I
had like some of my favorite artists in the scene.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
If you were to explain lo fi to somebody, how
do you explain it to them?
Speaker 1 (03:26):
The name lo fi itself predates all these beats, and
it comes from like lo fi. I think it was
used to describe kind of the the more dirty, disheveled,
grainy quality esque rock music from the nineties, like Pavement,
Guide by Voices.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
What counted as lo fi back then is kind of
hard to pin down because at first it really described
an approach more than a genre, like using cheap recording
equipment which would give you this more deliberately homemade and
intimate sound.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
And then people started to attach it to this kind
of beat style that you could say was pioneered by
like Jadela and like New Javass all.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Right, Just to be clear, neither I nor Kieran are
classifying jay Dilla as Lofi now New Javis retroactively. You
can make a case with that. So Nujabs was a
Japanese beat maker who's probably best known internationally for doing
the music for an anime called Samurai Champlu in the
early two thousands. It had this iconic theme song, and
(04:36):
some of the earliest beat makers who called themselves Lofi
were clearly imitating this Jay Dilla slash New Jobs style
and coming up with something that Kaen had that vibe,
and that led into something else.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
This sort of like jazzy jazz hop but still very
like technically intricate style of beat making that was almost
like it was like a hip hop beat that you
didn't need a vocalist for because it was so pleasurable
on its own. People have added all these different ingredients
on top, so when people say low fi beats, it
can really be anything from like jazzy piano led beats
(05:15):
to like bossa Nova to even people integrating like kroud rock.
All these different elements kind of feels like there's an
intimacy to it, like you're hearing somebody practice their drums,
like on the side of the road without an audience.
It feels kind of like you're just chilling with somebody
and the steaks aren't super high, and that feels comforting
in a way.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
When did lo fi get popular online?
Speaker 1 (05:43):
I would say around the early to mid twenty tens
is when there was a boom of YouTube mixes and
you started to see it on like SoundCloud, a lot
of people tagging it like hashtag lo fi, and then
it got really popular. I think when YouTube added it's
like live stream function, which enabled channels to do twenty
(06:05):
four hour broadcasts as if they were like digital radio
stations that you could tune into from wherever. One of
the main accounts called low fi Girl, would compile like
every low fi be in existence and just set it
on an endless loop. You could click on it whenever
you want. It'd be a constantly running chat of people
who'd be like, it's seven a even in Tokyo, what's up?
And they'd be talking em and be like doing their
(06:26):
work and just hanging out in this little like weird
third space.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
If you're into low fi music, I can almost one
hundred percent guarantee you that you've heard of Lo Fi Girl.
So Low Fi Girl is this YouTube channel that started
in twenty seventeen and they would do these twenty four
to seven live streams of lo fi music. At one
point it had gone for over thirteen thousand hours straight
when YouTube suddenly without warning, pulled the stream, just deleted
(06:52):
it out of nowhere. People got really really mad, and
YouTube actually apologized and put it back online. Low Fi
Girl now has over fifteen million subscribers. Because I remember
the Lo Fi Girl, right.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
The anime looking girl studying, Yeah, explain that to me,
so I think, to me, it always felt like it
came out of like af fixation with Hyamiyazaki in the
studio Ghibli like aesthetics online because that's like of perennially
popular on like Pinterest and TikTok edits. So it was
like sort of in that style, this just like woman
who looked vaguely Asian, vaguely from an anime, just like
(07:34):
a gift of her would be studying with like kind
of a city scape night in the background. It looked
very intimate and it have a real coziness to it,
like it felt like you were the rain was outside,
You're inside of their hot chocolate doing like your English homework,
and so that kind of just popped out of nowhere
with this this whole sort of like built in aesthetic
and they call it the Low Fi Girl, And since
(07:54):
then that account has become like a label where they
house low fi musicians and they're still going today. But
it became this massive phenomenon that was like the at
the center of the online lo fi craze, and then
from there spawned this entire genre of copycasts and clones
that gradually watered down the sound and just made it
(08:15):
this like lowest common denominator background thing. I think that's
like another one of the negative implications of the flattening
of the scene, where it's like you lose the context
and the origins and all these innovators and like the
real beat makers, you know, they think that they care
about Japan, or they fantasize about Japan, but it's like
(08:35):
they don't actually know, Like the labels that people are
part of.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
This Japan fantasy context is part of what makes LOFI
so fascinating to me. It's all tied to this idea
of Japan. Even if the actual Japanese hip hop scene
didn't have a whole lot to do with it. In
twenty eighteen, an earlier version of the Low Fi Grilt
channel was so popular that it had gotten mentioned in
the New York Times. That same year, in Tokyo, Dio
(09:00):
show hosted by a rapper named Hutamata, did a whole
segment on Lofi hip hop. Utumata is one of the
godfathers of Japanese hip hop. This dude's dropped like a
dozen albums, He's written magazine columns about hip hop culture,
He's written books about hip hop. This guy is a
Japanese rap legend going at least back to the early nineties.
And he had to have someone else come on the
(09:22):
show to explain Lofi to him because he had zero
idea of what Lofi was. And aside from that one
beat maker new Jobs, he seemed kind of confused that
people were associating it with Japan. This to me is
just hilarious. I mean, imagine that there's a bunch of
people online listening to this particular micro genre of instrumental
(09:43):
hip hop, and in the comments, it's all people saying, yeah, man,
this sounds just like la This makes me think of
being in Los Angeles. You know, Cadillac with the top
down in Los Angeles, and then all of a sudden,
Doctor Dre gets online, finds it and says, Yo, what
even is this? What are you guys doing? This kind
of genre where the people talking to each other and
(10:04):
imagining stuff is almost more important than the music itself.
It could probably only exist online and specifically on YouTube, but.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
That kind of gives it like this pseudo physical element
of being in a third space going along with this
like imagining of asia thing. It's like they talk about
how this video makes them feel like they're in an anime,
or they feel like they're in this movie or something.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
The fact that YouTube introduced the live streaming aspect really
meant that you could spend your whole day on YouTube
totally in a way that you couldn't before.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
But I think also there's like the elements of YouTube's
algorithm incentives where longer things would get prioritized because they
wanted to spend more time on it, right, so these
longer mixes would be brought to the front of the queue.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
This, I think is another defining aspect of lo fi.
It's a genre that fits two needs. For you Tube Tube,
it fits their need of keeping you on the platform
as long as possible to show you ads. And for
the listener who just needs something playing in the background
while you work or you study, they got your needs covered.
But the third party, the people who make the music,
(11:15):
they're not that relevant here the average person who listens
to lo fi. Do you think they could name five
lo fi artists?
Speaker 1 (11:23):
If the average is somebody who only listens to mixes
on YouTube, definitely not. They could maybe name a couple
of the YouTube channels. But I think there is really
like a sort of gradations of fandom, and I think
there are a lot of people who like use the
Reddit and are part of like producer collectives, and they,
you know, of course, could name a lot. Yeah, But
I think, yeah, there's kind of like two sides of
the lo fi listener.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
So tell me about that, because one thing I wasn't
really aware of that much is a community aspect of it.
What's the lo fi community?
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Like, I honestly wasn't even tapped in either until I
started writing this piece. But after I talked to a
bunch of artists. I talked to this artist Mia Eden,
who performs under the name Rosia. She told me that
she was part of these compilations that were dedicated to
supporting women beat makers. This one guy named Alex Reid,
(12:14):
who performs under the name Project Aer, told me that
he was part of this discord page that had just
like a ton of big name low fi producer in there,
and they would like talk about their lives, they would
play video games together. They're bonding over a love for
this music.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
It's interesting that there can be a community around a
genre in which a lot of people don't actually know
the artists. Because say whatever you want about top forty
pop music, people don't just say I like pop music.
They know who Taylor Swift is, they could give you
a few names, right. But LOFI is interesting, as you
(12:54):
were saying, it's almost the idea of going and being
in a room with a bunch of other people is
almost antithetical to the very idea of lo fi totally,
because the idea is to be isolated by yourself at
the desk with some hot chocolate in a blanket.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
And I think there's a lot of ways it feels
like maybe the first algorithmic genre, like just completely formed
in this like void and designed to be like it's
like efficiency music in a way efficiency music.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, It's like how at the office they give you coffee,
not because they like you, right, but they give you
coffee so you'll work harder.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
It's very utilitarian in that sense. I think the community
aspect is really only with the specific artists that love
this the sound and in some way, like I want
to shape it in a positive way. I think, you know,
probably the vast sepe of fans are more of this
just they don't really care what it is. They just
put it on because it's providing this basic function.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Lo fi might seem faceless now, but the original point
was that it felt human and there were humans making it.
In the twenty tens, when the scene really started coming together,
there were big producers like ev and Potzu, and it's
gotten bigger. Low Fi Girl has evolved to have its
own record label. So how much money were people making
on this? Let's talk before AI.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Before AI, people were making a good amount of money.
This woman mia Eden said she was making between the
five hundred to fifty hundred dollars a month and this
was like for her at the time, like enough to
kind of live off of. And other people were making
thousands of dollars they were getting like millions of streams
a month, a decent amount of money, like enough to
(14:37):
basically be either a full time job or a part
time job.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
But that's before AI and things are starting to change.
We'll get into that after the break. You were already
listening to Low five. What are you a fan of it?
(15:01):
And then when did you start noticing AI creeping into it?
Speaker 1 (15:06):
I think a couple of years ago is when I
saw Ai Lo Fi for the first time, and I
think it was I partly was researching it because I
knew that these things were starting. There was the Drake
Weekend AI song. There are all these albums that were
like imitating Playboy Carti's voice with AI, and so I
was like, you know, I wonder what scenes impacting. And
(15:27):
I immediately was like Lo Fi already has such a
low barrier to entry, like this would be very easy
prey for AI, and so I started looking. It's probably
twenty twenty three, and they were definitely creeping up then,
and it was sort of hard to tell it first
because they wouldn't say that they were AI and YouTube
only as this sort of optional disclosure thing where you
(15:49):
don't need to say that your video is AI, so
a lot of them just wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Even if a track wasn't explicitly labeled as AI. You
used to be able to tell the pianos might sound
a little wonky, the drums would be a little off.
But the models are getting better and it's sounding more
and more just like lo Fi. It's getting a lot
harder to tell. Like, for example, this track that you've
been hearing behind me, this one was generated by AI.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
I think it shows that people are using it in
insidious ways. I think as AI technology improved, it's only
going to get more difficult. I think if you type
in lo fi beats now, like because of their like
Seo legacy, you'll still get lo fi girl who they
told me they don't use AI for the music, so
you'll get some like real authentic creators. But then if
(16:44):
you go down, especially after first three or four, it
is like all AI, Like it's all stuff in the
last nine months, like these three hour mixes that kind
of like imagine you're in Japan, or it'll have like
kind of like framed paintings almost like the fit like
a Mac to Marco album or something. And I think
that is tricking a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Now, man, you know, I'm just even looking at this
right now, I'm looking at videos on YouTube with tutorials,
and this one is called create Monetizable low Fi Music
Videos using AI for free and minutes. Hold on, let
me click on this first one. This one has seventy
(17:24):
two thousand views.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
God dang.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
So there is a market for people who were realizing,
wait a second, I can make fake music and make
money off of it.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Actually, that's very funny. Earlier today also I saw this
account that his name is bitcoin Nation and has like
over a million subscribers on YouTube, and I think it's
ostensibly I think it was created to pedal bitcoin. But
now they've joined the AI low fi scene and they're
spamming hours long mixes. It's basically just become like it's
(17:58):
like a meta people don't even care about music, just
anybody who wants to get rich quick. It's become a
new get rich quick scheme online for a lot of people,
I think, to just it just seem AI. They're like, Okay,
maybe we can try this out. See if I go
viral with that.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Even the United States government has gotten into lo fi.
The White House put out a video called One Big
Beautiful Bill Lo Fi Maga video to Relax Slash study too.
That's the full title, and it's about twelve hours of
this AI looking Donald Trump sitting at his desk signing stuff,
waving a flag, making McDonald's French fries while part of
(18:33):
the text of the Big Beautiful Bill scrolls on the
side and lo fi music plays in the background. It's
on white House dot gov right now, but there aren't
any artist credits. I can't say definitively that all of
this stuff is AI. But remember, people like this stuff.
They liked it. It felt homemade and human, and AI
(18:57):
is making it easy for anyone to just crank this
stuff out out for whatever purpose, and that's kind of
bothering people. How is the community responding to all of this.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
They're responding as well as you could. I think the
community on Reddit, it's not super huge, but they're all
pretty upset. A lot of them have just quit the.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Genre, entirely quit the genre.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah, they've said, I can't listen to this anymore. I
don't know what's real and what's fake.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
And it's discouraged them. And I think the musicians themselves also,
like these people who it was their livelihood before. They
have since lost all that money because their streams have dropped.
One of the guys went from like two million streams
to four hundred thousand. It's interesting because they're very discouraged
and dispirited, but there's also like this sort of counter
like war being waged. Like a lot of them now
(19:47):
in their descriptions or in their titles, they'll write no
AI or AI free. So they're trying to cultivate an
audience of people who will only seek out the real stuff.
But I think the large like thoughts right now is
that it's it's pretty bleak for people who have loved
this scene.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
So I did an episode Onvtubersvtubing is an interesting community
because it's also something where you would think that AI
could encroach pretty quickly on, and I still think they
frankly speaking, got to target on their backs. But one
thing is thatvtuber fans, especially with the music. I can't
(20:27):
say everybody, but a lot of prominent people seem to
be really anti AI, which is interesting, right because the
characters themselves, the models are not real people.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
There's a bunch of anime girls and they're both anime girls, right.
The lo Fi girl, anime girl, a lot of the
avatars for v tubers anime girls. But VTuber fans seem
to be fighting against the AI on slot and it
seems to be successful so far. Lo Fi don't know, man,
(21:00):
I'm not the war. I don't know what the war
looks like. But the war isn't looking good.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
I think maybe the difference is like in the youtubing world,
there's like such a massive parasocial thing right where it's
instead of watching like Destiny or like any Fantano, your
goat is like this anime Avatar or something, so you
feel like the AI is an encroachment on that. But
maybe in the lo fi music sphere, it's like the
(21:27):
opposite of parasocial. It's like people have a very anti
social relationship with the music because they don't know who's
making it. They don't really care about the scene. For
the most part, they're just like being fatted on YouTube.
I think if you told any Lofi fans, some say
I they would be repulsed by it. But I think
a lot of people they just don't even care enough
to check.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, because I guess if you're thinking about something as
background music, you're not necessarily thinking about that. There was
a person who made it. It's a vibe essentially exactly,
speaking of which you actually spoke to to somebody who
makes AI low five, tell me about that. How did
you even get somebody to talk about this?
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I was pretty surprised. A lot of them don't have emails,
but some of them do have emails on their YouTube account.
So I just emailed every single one and one of
them got back to me, and I asked him a
bunch of questions and then I asked him some more
invasive ones after and he didn't reply at all. But
initially he was like this that isn't as good, but
(22:28):
it can approximate what real lo fi sounds like, and
used it for everything, used it for visuals, for text,
for the music itself. This person actually they owned I
think like five or six separate accounts, but they had
this one account that had a lot of views that
was specifically low fi themed because they had like a
sleep noise channel. They had all these like different like niches.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Wait, they had sleep noise channels also. This is interesting.
So basically, just anything that will optimize for somebody turning
this on and leaving this on for a few hours
so you can get YouTube.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Ad revenue exactly. Yeah, they might do like rain sounds
also just like anything like the OLM, like meditation, thing
like yoga music, anything that you can just loop endlessly.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Tell me this the listeners. Do you think listeners care
if lo fi is AI generated?
Speaker 1 (23:23):
I think it really goes back to depending on what
you use it for. There are a lot of people
who I'm sure a lot of tech workers listen to
Lofi beats while they're grinding on their code, and I'm
sure a lot of them love AI and they probably
think it's really cool that AI can approximate this sound
and power them through their workdays. But I hope that
(23:47):
there are a lot of people who when they find
out that AI would be propelled or be like, oh,
that's weird and uncanny. It's my hope that if they're
putting on AI stuff, they're just not aware of it.
And based on what I've seen online, people really do
care and they're not happy.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
So it's starting to sound like low fi hip hop
might be cooked. But what about rock music reggae? That's
after the break. The infiltration of AI and the lo
(24:26):
fi hip hop brings up this larger question of whether
or not people can tell if the music they're listening
to has been generated by AI, or if they can't tell,
whether or not they would even care. You might have
heard about this rock band called Velvet Sundown that people
were starting to suspect was AI, but just a few
weeks after debuting their first album, it had over a
(24:48):
million streams on Spotify.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
That was crazy. There was no info about the band online.
There were the pictures of four men as lurry faded,
looked like an old Instagram filter was on. It didn't
look real. And then people reached out to the band
and at first someone said that it was all real,
there was no AI at all, And then they conceded
that it was AI, but they were like, we got you.
This was actually like a trick to see if you
(25:11):
were paying attention.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
It took a while, but the band finally updated their
Spotify bio to say quote, the Velvet Sundown is a
synthetic music project guided by human creative direction and composed, voiced,
and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
But a lot of people couldn't tell. They just liked
the sound of the music. This is happening a lot
right now. This massive reggae song it has on YouTube,
it has I think like ten million views.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Ut sasmith ut such Smith Soul.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
You Jay.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
This is so hollow by a band called Let Babylon Burn.
They have hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube and Spotify,
but not a lot of info about themselves. Otherwise, the
video itself doesn't say anything about AI. You got to
go digging around their YouTube profile for that, and if
you look there, it calls the songs quote a unique
(26:10):
fusion of acoustic music production, recording and AI enhanced creativity.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
So this stuff is just it's like spreading like wildfire,
and at least on this reggae one on YouTube in
the comments, nobody can tell that it's AI. And they're
really heartfelt messages. People are saying that with music made
them feel like they're experiencing like a montage of their
memories from when they were younger. It's like something that
(26:39):
they made them feel like they're like at their grandma's
like side of her like possible bed, and it's like
making them happy almost like terrifying levels of like on reality.
Just spreading across these platforms and Spotify isn't doing anything
to moderate it.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Do you think Spotify or these platforms should do something
to modern right.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
It's a tough question because on the one hand, I
would say definitely like the easy answers, yes, But then
you have to ask, like how do you moderate this?
Because there are so many different ways of using AI
along the production process. I've heard rumors that many rappers
now are just chat to be seeing lyrics in the studio,
and it's like, does that kind of using AI?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
I've seen rappers say out loud just out that they
do it.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
There's just so many ways where it's if you're gonna
block something that's AI, it's how much AI would require
you to block them? And also maybe you can use
AI in creative ways. I think as long as you
know that is AI, like that would solve a lot
of issues. And then if it didn't, you know, we
could just shame the people who like AI.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
But I think it's hard to do that though. We
can't just shame people who like AI because I think
there's gonna be a moment if it hasn't already happened,
like what is happening with this reggae song or with
Velvet Sundown frankly, where you hear something you think, yeah,
I like this, and you only find out later it's
(28:03):
AI generated.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
I think that's already happened.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
I think so that it might have happened to me.
I've definitely listened to stuff and then oh, this is cool.
And I looked at the description this is on YouTube
and they actually disclosed this is. It said something like
this was made partly with AI, and oh, yeah, I
ain't gonna lie man. I felt like, damn, do I
really understand music?
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Some of that shit is like really hard to tell.
Even like the song Timeless by Cardi in the Weekend.
Apparently Cardi's verse allegedly used AI the song rather lie.
On Cardi's album, I think used some AI. There are
all these massive songs that there's a good chance HEYI
is involved in them, and they're good songs right now?
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Are is there like a tell where you can tell,
especially if there's an AI generated lo fi song? Are
there tells that will you can pick that out and say, oh,
I hear this is probably AI.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Is pretty because there's not much thought put into the
AI ones where it'll be like the same couple instruments,
the exact same drum pattern, the exact same like texture
of like a synth or something, or like the same
few piano notes. I think, for me, like the easiest
way at this point from surfing through trawling through so
much content is like the text around it, like the
(29:21):
semantics of how people frame it, because they will just
have a list of songs that you can't find anywhere
else on the internet. When you're like, okay, a human
was not involved in this production.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
What do you think this says for other genres? Is
this something that's going to stop at lo fi is
or is lo fi a preview of what could happen
to other genres.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
It's not even a preview at this point. I think
it's already. Other genres are already being cannibalized in the same
way that lo fi beats have been. I think it's
really just a byproduct of the online streaming economy. It's
magical in a way the music is so immaterial and
that you can listen to anything anywhere. But you know,
(30:04):
there was something great about records and CDs and like
having to own this stuff because you were curious about
it and because you knew who the artist was. I
think now we've gone too far the other way. Music
is too accessible potentially, it's too like algorithmified, and it
just lubricates this whole environment where now AI can slip in.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
There's some things that will make me think that the
lo fi hip hop was kind of the Canardiyan the
coal mine.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Yeah. I think it's a matter of time, but also
a matter of is it gonna be an any bigger
pushback from streaming platforms, or maybe there'll just be a
parallel economy of like real music and then AI music.
Maybe the vast bulk of it or the YouTube stuff
will be AI, but then there will be this side
movement of AI free lofi.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, there will be people who want the human touch,
even for a genre that is lifeless. They want to
feel the life in it.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
I saw this YouTube video that said lo fi jungle
playlist as in like jungle and drummer bass, and I
was just curious and I thought, Oh, I wonder what
lo fi jungle sounds like. This sounds like something somebody
made up, but I'm curious to see what it sounds like.
And I listened maybe ten seconds in Yeah, and I
could tell because there was something different about the drums
(31:19):
and drums just weren't hitting right. And then I looked
in the description and this person actually disclosed it that
this was AI generated but you really had to look
down in the description to see that. But yeah, man,
sometimes I can tell and sometimes I can't. To be real,
well that's crazy.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
There's I didn't know. It's AI jungle.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
I love jungle and drum and bass me too. That's
when I started getting mad. That's when I actually got
upset because.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
I felt like, like, it's on my territory now.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, now you're in my territory like lo fi, Okay,
you can have that jungle and I that's when I
started to really sympathize with people for whom lo fi
as a genre, as an aesthetic, as a community truly
means something. That's when I started to really feel it
because I thought, oh, this feeling that I'm feeling right now,
there's a whole bunch of people who are probably feeling
(32:07):
that exact same thing. All right, before we get out
of here, you might have listened to this and be thinking, Yo,
this dude dexter is just a lo fi hater? What's
his problem? But like I said, I have a love
hate relationship with lo fi. And I mean that because
at one point I was so annoyed with the genre
that I decided to make a low fi hip hop
(32:28):
album just to prove how whack a genre it was.
I don't know, I'm weird like that, But in the process,
I don't know, I ended up kind of liking it actually,
With the exception of that anime theme song and that
one track that I told you was AI, every lo
fi track in this episode. I made that. So you
can say whatever you want about me, but you can't
(32:49):
say I don't do my homework. And look, I get it.
Lo fi is a lot of it's just chill background music,
but there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. There's nothing wrong
with having music that's easy to make. I think it's
good to have something that's low barrier to entry. We
want more people to feel what it's like to participate
in art. Why would we gatekeep that. It's just weird
(33:12):
to know that some of the stuff that makes it
easier for us to feel human is also what makes
it so vulnerable to AI. And that's what it is
for this one. Thank you so much for listening to
kill Switch. You can email us at kill Switch at
Kaleidoscope dot NYC or we're on Instagram at kill Switch
(33:36):
pod and wherever you're listening to this, maybe leave us
a review. It helps other people find the show, which
in turn helps us keep doing our thing. Kill Switch
is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheen Ozaki,
Darluck Potts, and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by
me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show.
(33:56):
From Kaleidoscope, Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin, mangesh Ha Ho Jigadur,
and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina
Norville and Nikki E. Tor. One more thing. This whole
thing made me think about a recent episode we did
on v tubers. This is the one where I went
to a venue where there's like hundreds and hundreds of
people all hanging out watching well fake musicians. These live
(34:20):
events gathering together is one aspect of V twoing that
for now, I think is keeping that scene alive and
preventing AI from encroaching too much on that culture. And
it made me think of if something like this could
happen for lo Fi so I asked, Kieran, is there
any live aspect to any of this?
Speaker 1 (34:41):
That was something that I asked these people about because
I was very curious, and a lot of them said no,
that it was very much just like almost like an
introverts genre, like a very homebody, homespun kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Interesting, So no lo fi festival, no gathering of lo
Fi fans, like nobody can sit get in a blanket
and be cozy together or something. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Okay, there must have been, right, there must have been
like a low campfire sash somewhere, because I think the
thing about LOFI is that it is like anti energy
in a way. You know. I think that so many
of the listeners are also both scattered around the world
and they enjoyed in this passive way. They're not going
to necessarily buy a ticket to go to a LOFI
festival because they want to experience it at home.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Okay, well, I guess not. But if you do hear
of any in person Lo fi shows, let me know.
I actually think it hitting one of those up anyway,
catch on the next one.
It would be like the same few loops over and
over again, and there was a real like lack of
dynamism to them, but there's something kind of robotic about it.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Kieran press Reynolds is a columnist for Pitchfork. But while back,
he wrote an article about how AI is taking over
a specific genre of music, low fi beats.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
And theious videos were like hours long, and they'd either
have no song titles in the description, which is a
big red flag, or they would have timestamps with songs
the titles that were just saying nothing like they would
all be sort of like just seeming like generated nonsense.
So there are all these kind of clues that this
music something fishy is going on.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
You might not know lo fi by name, but you've
probably heard of before. It's usually part of these long
mixes on YouTube or Spotify. It's just kind of muffled
instrumental hip hop. It's inoffensive, it's calming. It kind of
sounds like you could play it in a coffee shop.
It kind of sounds like this, to be real with you,
(01:23):
low fi is not my favorite genre. I have a
love hate relationship with it at best. To me, a
lot of it's repetitive, it doesn't go anywhere, and a
lot of it just sounds the same, which would make
it a perfect target for AI. And the hardcore fans
are starting to freak.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Out, and I went to the Reddit page. More and
more people were posting like, what is this channel? This
looks sort of dodgy, and other people were like, oh
my god, the genre has become overrun. A lot of
these people really love the genre. But even they who
were like PhDs in the genre, they couldn't discern some
of this stuff. They were like, I have no idea
(02:02):
if it's a I like, the genre has been overrun
and now it's everywhere. A lot of people have almost
just given up. They've because they're the genre just like
a wasteland, Like it's over.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Maybe this doesn't sound like a big deal to you,
because maybe you don't listen to low fi. But what
if this is just a preview of what happens when
the robots come for your favorite genre. From Kaleidoscope and
iHeart Podcasts, this is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas, So
(02:46):
we're here to talk about lo fi hip hop? What
first got you into lo fi?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
I used to be really big on YouTube, and it
probably just like ambiently appeared on my feet or the
algorithm gave it to me. It was targeted for you
to like to study two to play video games too,
and it really grabbed me like a decade ago when
I heard it.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
So would you call yourself a low five fan? Then?
Speaker 1 (03:09):
I was definitely not like in the community back in
the day, but I was definitely into it, and I
had like some of my favorite artists in the scene.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
If you were to explain lo fi to somebody, how
do you explain it to them?
Speaker 1 (03:26):
The name lo fi itself predates all these beats, and
it comes from like lo fi. I think it was
used to describe kind of the the more dirty, disheveled,
grainy quality esque rock music from the nineties, like Pavement,
Guide by Voices.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
What counted as lo fi back then is kind of
hard to pin down because at first it really described
an approach more than a genre, like using cheap recording
equipment which would give you this more deliberately homemade and
intimate sound.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
And then people started to attach it to this kind
of beat style that you could say was pioneered by
like Jadela and like New Javass all.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Right, Just to be clear, neither I nor Kieran are
classifying jay Dilla as Lofi now New Javis retroactively. You
can make a case with that. So Nujabs was a
Japanese beat maker who's probably best known internationally for doing
the music for an anime called Samurai Champlu in the
early two thousands. It had this iconic theme song, and
(04:36):
some of the earliest beat makers who called themselves Lofi
were clearly imitating this Jay Dilla slash New Jobs style
and coming up with something that Kaen had that vibe,
and that led into something else.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
This sort of like jazzy jazz hop but still very
like technically intricate style of beat making that was almost
like it was like a hip hop beat that you
didn't need a vocalist for because it was so pleasurable
on its own. People have added all these different ingredients
on top, so when people say low fi beats, it
can really be anything from like jazzy piano led beats
(05:15):
to like bossa Nova to even people integrating like kroud rock.
All these different elements kind of feels like there's an
intimacy to it, like you're hearing somebody practice their drums,
like on the side of the road without an audience.
It feels kind of like you're just chilling with somebody
and the steaks aren't super high, and that feels comforting
in a way.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
When did lo fi get popular online?
Speaker 1 (05:43):
I would say around the early to mid twenty tens
is when there was a boom of YouTube mixes and
you started to see it on like SoundCloud, a lot
of people tagging it like hashtag lo fi, and then
it got really popular. I think when YouTube added it's
like live stream function, which enabled channels to do twenty
(06:05):
four hour broadcasts as if they were like digital radio
stations that you could tune into from wherever. One of
the main accounts called low fi Girl, would compile like
every low fi be in existence and just set it
on an endless loop. You could click on it whenever
you want. It'd be a constantly running chat of people
who'd be like, it's seven a even in Tokyo, what's up?
And they'd be talking em and be like doing their
(06:26):
work and just hanging out in this little like weird
third space.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
If you're into low fi music, I can almost one
hundred percent guarantee you that you've heard of Lo Fi Girl.
So Low Fi Girl is this YouTube channel that started
in twenty seventeen and they would do these twenty four
to seven live streams of lo fi music. At one
point it had gone for over thirteen thousand hours straight
when YouTube suddenly without warning, pulled the stream, just deleted
(06:52):
it out of nowhere. People got really really mad, and
YouTube actually apologized and put it back online. Low Fi
Girl now has over fifteen million subscribers. Because I remember
the Lo Fi Girl, right.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
The anime looking girl studying, Yeah, explain that to me,
so I think, to me, it always felt like it
came out of like af fixation with Hyamiyazaki in the
studio Ghibli like aesthetics online because that's like of perennially
popular on like Pinterest and TikTok edits. So it was
like sort of in that style, this just like woman
who looked vaguely Asian, vaguely from an anime, just like
(07:34):
a gift of her would be studying with like kind
of a city scape night in the background. It looked
very intimate and it have a real coziness to it,
like it felt like you were the rain was outside,
You're inside of their hot chocolate doing like your English homework,
and so that kind of just popped out of nowhere
with this this whole sort of like built in aesthetic
and they call it the Low Fi Girl, And since
(07:54):
then that account has become like a label where they
house low fi musicians and they're still going today. But
it became this massive phenomenon that was like the at
the center of the online lo fi craze, and then
from there spawned this entire genre of copycasts and clones
that gradually watered down the sound and just made it
(08:15):
this like lowest common denominator background thing. I think that's
like another one of the negative implications of the flattening
of the scene, where it's like you lose the context
and the origins and all these innovators and like the
real beat makers, you know, they think that they care
about Japan, or they fantasize about Japan, but it's like
(08:35):
they don't actually know, Like the labels that people are
part of.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
This Japan fantasy context is part of what makes LOFI
so fascinating to me. It's all tied to this idea
of Japan. Even if the actual Japanese hip hop scene
didn't have a whole lot to do with it. In
twenty eighteen, an earlier version of the Low Fi Grilt
channel was so popular that it had gotten mentioned in
the New York Times. That same year, in Tokyo, Dio
(09:00):
show hosted by a rapper named Hutamata, did a whole
segment on Lofi hip hop. Utumata is one of the
godfathers of Japanese hip hop. This dude's dropped like a
dozen albums, He's written magazine columns about hip hop culture,
He's written books about hip hop. This guy is a
Japanese rap legend going at least back to the early nineties.
And he had to have someone else come on the
(09:22):
show to explain Lofi to him because he had zero
idea of what Lofi was. And aside from that one
beat maker new Jobs, he seemed kind of confused that
people were associating it with Japan. This to me is
just hilarious. I mean, imagine that there's a bunch of
people online listening to this particular micro genre of instrumental
(09:43):
hip hop, and in the comments, it's all people saying, yeah, man,
this sounds just like la This makes me think of
being in Los Angeles. You know, Cadillac with the top
down in Los Angeles, and then all of a sudden,
Doctor Dre gets online, finds it and says, Yo, what
even is this? What are you guys doing? This kind
of genre where the people talking to each other and
(10:04):
imagining stuff is almost more important than the music itself.
It could probably only exist online and specifically on YouTube, but.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
That kind of gives it like this pseudo physical element
of being in a third space going along with this
like imagining of asia thing. It's like they talk about
how this video makes them feel like they're in an anime,
or they feel like they're in this movie or something.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
The fact that YouTube introduced the live streaming aspect really
meant that you could spend your whole day on YouTube
totally in a way that you couldn't before.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
But I think also there's like the elements of YouTube's
algorithm incentives where longer things would get prioritized because they
wanted to spend more time on it, right, so these
longer mixes would be brought to the front of the queue.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
This, I think is another defining aspect of lo fi.
It's a genre that fits two needs. For you Tube Tube,
it fits their need of keeping you on the platform
as long as possible to show you ads. And for
the listener who just needs something playing in the background
while you work or you study, they got your needs covered.
But the third party, the people who make the music,
(11:15):
they're not that relevant here the average person who listens
to lo fi. Do you think they could name five
lo fi artists?
Speaker 1 (11:23):
If the average is somebody who only listens to mixes
on YouTube, definitely not. They could maybe name a couple
of the YouTube channels. But I think there is really
like a sort of gradations of fandom, and I think
there are a lot of people who like use the
Reddit and are part of like producer collectives, and they,
you know, of course, could name a lot. Yeah, But
I think, yeah, there's kind of like two sides of
the lo fi listener.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
So tell me about that, because one thing I wasn't
really aware of that much is a community aspect of it.
What's the lo fi community?
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Like, I honestly wasn't even tapped in either until I
started writing this piece. But after I talked to a
bunch of artists. I talked to this artist Mia Eden,
who performs under the name Rosia. She told me that
she was part of these compilations that were dedicated to
supporting women beat makers. This one guy named Alex Reid,
(12:14):
who performs under the name Project Aer, told me that
he was part of this discord page that had just
like a ton of big name low fi producer in there,
and they would like talk about their lives, they would
play video games together. They're bonding over a love for
this music.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
It's interesting that there can be a community around a
genre in which a lot of people don't actually know
the artists. Because say whatever you want about top forty
pop music, people don't just say I like pop music.
They know who Taylor Swift is, they could give you
a few names, right. But LOFI is interesting, as you
(12:54):
were saying, it's almost the idea of going and being
in a room with a bunch of other people is
almost antithetical to the very idea of lo fi totally,
because the idea is to be isolated by yourself at
the desk with some hot chocolate in a blanket.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
And I think there's a lot of ways it feels
like maybe the first algorithmic genre, like just completely formed
in this like void and designed to be like it's
like efficiency music in a way efficiency music.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, It's like how at the office they give you coffee,
not because they like you, right, but they give you
coffee so you'll work harder.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
It's very utilitarian in that sense. I think the community
aspect is really only with the specific artists that love
this the sound and in some way, like I want
to shape it in a positive way. I think, you know,
probably the vast sepe of fans are more of this
just they don't really care what it is. They just
put it on because it's providing this basic function.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Lo fi might seem faceless now, but the original point
was that it felt human and there were humans making it.
In the twenty tens, when the scene really started coming together,
there were big producers like ev and Potzu, and it's
gotten bigger. Low Fi Girl has evolved to have its
own record label. So how much money were people making
on this? Let's talk before AI.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Before AI, people were making a good amount of money.
This woman mia Eden said she was making between the
five hundred to fifty hundred dollars a month and this
was like for her at the time, like enough to
kind of live off of. And other people were making
thousands of dollars they were getting like millions of streams
a month, a decent amount of money, like enough to
(14:37):
basically be either a full time job or a part
time job.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
But that's before AI and things are starting to change.
We'll get into that after the break. You were already
listening to Low five. What are you a fan of it?
(15:01):
And then when did you start noticing AI creeping into it?
Speaker 1 (15:06):
I think a couple of years ago is when I
saw Ai Lo Fi for the first time, and I
think it was I partly was researching it because I
knew that these things were starting. There was the Drake
Weekend AI song. There are all these albums that were
like imitating Playboy Carti's voice with AI, and so I
was like, you know, I wonder what scenes impacting. And
(15:27):
I immediately was like Lo Fi already has such a
low barrier to entry, like this would be very easy
prey for AI, and so I started looking. It's probably
twenty twenty three, and they were definitely creeping up then,
and it was sort of hard to tell it first
because they wouldn't say that they were AI and YouTube
only as this sort of optional disclosure thing where you
(15:49):
don't need to say that your video is AI, so
a lot of them just wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Even if a track wasn't explicitly labeled as AI. You
used to be able to tell the pianos might sound
a little wonky, the drums would be a little off.
But the models are getting better and it's sounding more
and more just like lo Fi. It's getting a lot
harder to tell. Like, for example, this track that you've
been hearing behind me, this one was generated by AI.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
I think it shows that people are using it in
insidious ways. I think as AI technology improved, it's only
going to get more difficult. I think if you type
in lo fi beats now, like because of their like
Seo legacy, you'll still get lo fi girl who they
told me they don't use AI for the music, so
you'll get some like real authentic creators. But then if
(16:44):
you go down, especially after first three or four, it
is like all AI, Like it's all stuff in the
last nine months, like these three hour mixes that kind
of like imagine you're in Japan, or it'll have like
kind of like framed paintings almost like the fit like
a Mac to Marco album or something. And I think
that is tricking a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Now, man, you know, I'm just even looking at this
right now, I'm looking at videos on YouTube with tutorials,
and this one is called create Monetizable low Fi Music
Videos using AI for free and minutes. Hold on, let
me click on this first one. This one has seventy
(17:24):
two thousand views.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
God dang.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
So there is a market for people who were realizing,
wait a second, I can make fake music and make
money off of it.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Actually, that's very funny. Earlier today also I saw this
account that his name is bitcoin Nation and has like
over a million subscribers on YouTube, and I think it's
ostensibly I think it was created to pedal bitcoin. But
now they've joined the AI low fi scene and they're
spamming hours long mixes. It's basically just become like it's
(17:58):
like a meta people don't even care about music, just
anybody who wants to get rich quick. It's become a
new get rich quick scheme online for a lot of people,
I think, to just it just seem AI. They're like, Okay,
maybe we can try this out. See if I go
viral with that.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Even the United States government has gotten into lo fi.
The White House put out a video called One Big
Beautiful Bill Lo Fi Maga video to Relax Slash study too.
That's the full title, and it's about twelve hours of
this AI looking Donald Trump sitting at his desk signing stuff,
waving a flag, making McDonald's French fries while part of
(18:33):
the text of the Big Beautiful Bill scrolls on the
side and lo fi music plays in the background. It's
on white House dot gov right now, but there aren't
any artist credits. I can't say definitively that all of
this stuff is AI. But remember, people like this stuff.
They liked it. It felt homemade and human, and AI
(18:57):
is making it easy for anyone to just crank this
stuff out out for whatever purpose, and that's kind of
bothering people. How is the community responding to all of this.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
They're responding as well as you could. I think the
community on Reddit, it's not super huge, but they're all
pretty upset. A lot of them have just quit the.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Genre, entirely quit the genre.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah, they've said, I can't listen to this anymore. I
don't know what's real and what's fake.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
And it's discouraged them. And I think the musicians themselves also,
like these people who it was their livelihood before. They
have since lost all that money because their streams have dropped.
One of the guys went from like two million streams
to four hundred thousand. It's interesting because they're very discouraged
and dispirited, but there's also like this sort of counter
like war being waged. Like a lot of them now
(19:47):
in their descriptions or in their titles, they'll write no
AI or AI free. So they're trying to cultivate an
audience of people who will only seek out the real stuff.
But I think the large like thoughts right now is
that it's it's pretty bleak for people who have loved
this scene.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
So I did an episode Onvtubersvtubing is an interesting community
because it's also something where you would think that AI
could encroach pretty quickly on, and I still think they
frankly speaking, got to target on their backs. But one
thing is thatvtuber fans, especially with the music. I can't
(20:27):
say everybody, but a lot of prominent people seem to
be really anti AI, which is interesting, right because the
characters themselves, the models are not real people.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
There's a bunch of anime girls and they're both anime girls, right.
The lo Fi girl, anime girl, a lot of the
avatars for v tubers anime girls. But VTuber fans seem
to be fighting against the AI on slot and it
seems to be successful so far. Lo Fi don't know, man,
(21:00):
I'm not the war. I don't know what the war
looks like. But the war isn't looking good.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
I think maybe the difference is like in the youtubing world,
there's like such a massive parasocial thing right where it's
instead of watching like Destiny or like any Fantano, your
goat is like this anime Avatar or something, so you
feel like the AI is an encroachment on that. But
maybe in the lo fi music sphere, it's like the
(21:27):
opposite of parasocial. It's like people have a very anti
social relationship with the music because they don't know who's
making it. They don't really care about the scene. For
the most part, they're just like being fatted on YouTube.
I think if you told any Lofi fans, some say
I they would be repulsed by it. But I think
a lot of people they just don't even care enough
to check.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, because I guess if you're thinking about something as
background music, you're not necessarily thinking about that. There was
a person who made it. It's a vibe essentially exactly,
speaking of which you actually spoke to to somebody who
makes AI low five, tell me about that. How did
you even get somebody to talk about this?
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I was pretty surprised. A lot of them don't have emails,
but some of them do have emails on their YouTube account.
So I just emailed every single one and one of
them got back to me, and I asked him a
bunch of questions and then I asked him some more
invasive ones after and he didn't reply at all. But
initially he was like this that isn't as good, but
(22:28):
it can approximate what real lo fi sounds like, and
used it for everything, used it for visuals, for text,
for the music itself. This person actually they owned I
think like five or six separate accounts, but they had
this one account that had a lot of views that
was specifically low fi themed because they had like a
sleep noise channel. They had all these like different like niches.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Wait, they had sleep noise channels also. This is interesting.
So basically, just anything that will optimize for somebody turning
this on and leaving this on for a few hours
so you can get YouTube.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Ad revenue exactly. Yeah, they might do like rain sounds
also just like anything like the OLM, like meditation, thing
like yoga music, anything that you can just loop endlessly.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Tell me this the listeners. Do you think listeners care
if lo fi is AI generated?
Speaker 1 (23:23):
I think it really goes back to depending on what
you use it for. There are a lot of people
who I'm sure a lot of tech workers listen to
Lofi beats while they're grinding on their code, and I'm
sure a lot of them love AI and they probably
think it's really cool that AI can approximate this sound
and power them through their workdays. But I hope that
(23:47):
there are a lot of people who when they find
out that AI would be propelled or be like, oh,
that's weird and uncanny. It's my hope that if they're
putting on AI stuff, they're just not aware of it.
And based on what I've seen online, people really do
care and they're not happy.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
So it's starting to sound like low fi hip hop
might be cooked. But what about rock music reggae? That's
after the break. The infiltration of AI and the lo
(24:26):
fi hip hop brings up this larger question of whether
or not people can tell if the music they're listening
to has been generated by AI, or if they can't tell,
whether or not they would even care. You might have
heard about this rock band called Velvet Sundown that people
were starting to suspect was AI, but just a few
weeks after debuting their first album, it had over a
(24:48):
million streams on Spotify.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
That was crazy. There was no info about the band online.
There were the pictures of four men as lurry faded,
looked like an old Instagram filter was on. It didn't
look real. And then people reached out to the band
and at first someone said that it was all real,
there was no AI at all, And then they conceded
that it was AI, but they were like, we got you.
This was actually like a trick to see if you
(25:11):
were paying attention.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
It took a while, but the band finally updated their
Spotify bio to say quote, the Velvet Sundown is a
synthetic music project guided by human creative direction and composed, voiced,
and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
But a lot of people couldn't tell. They just liked
the sound of the music. This is happening a lot
right now. This massive reggae song it has on YouTube,
it has I think like ten million views.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Ut sasmith ut such Smith Soul.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
You Jay.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
This is so hollow by a band called Let Babylon Burn.
They have hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube and Spotify,
but not a lot of info about themselves. Otherwise, the
video itself doesn't say anything about AI. You got to
go digging around their YouTube profile for that, and if
you look there, it calls the songs quote a unique
(26:10):
fusion of acoustic music production, recording and AI enhanced creativity.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
So this stuff is just it's like spreading like wildfire,
and at least on this reggae one on YouTube in
the comments, nobody can tell that it's AI. And they're
really heartfelt messages. People are saying that with music made
them feel like they're experiencing like a montage of their
memories from when they were younger. It's like something that
(26:39):
they made them feel like they're like at their grandma's
like side of her like possible bed, and it's like
making them happy almost like terrifying levels of like on reality.
Just spreading across these platforms and Spotify isn't doing anything
to moderate it.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Do you think Spotify or these platforms should do something
to modern right.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
It's a tough question because on the one hand, I
would say definitely like the easy answers, yes, But then
you have to ask, like how do you moderate this?
Because there are so many different ways of using AI
along the production process. I've heard rumors that many rappers
now are just chat to be seeing lyrics in the studio,
and it's like, does that kind of using AI?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
I've seen rappers say out loud just out that they
do it.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
There's just so many ways where it's if you're gonna
block something that's AI, it's how much AI would require
you to block them? And also maybe you can use
AI in creative ways. I think as long as you
know that is AI, like that would solve a lot
of issues. And then if it didn't, you know, we
could just shame the people who like AI.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
But I think it's hard to do that though. We
can't just shame people who like AI because I think
there's gonna be a moment if it hasn't already happened,
like what is happening with this reggae song or with
Velvet Sundown frankly, where you hear something you think, yeah,
I like this, and you only find out later it's
(28:03):
AI generated.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
I think that's already happened.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
I think so that it might have happened to me.
I've definitely listened to stuff and then oh, this is cool.
And I looked at the description this is on YouTube
and they actually disclosed this is. It said something like
this was made partly with AI, and oh, yeah, I
ain't gonna lie man. I felt like, damn, do I
really understand music?
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Some of that shit is like really hard to tell.
Even like the song Timeless by Cardi in the Weekend.
Apparently Cardi's verse allegedly used AI the song rather lie.
On Cardi's album, I think used some AI. There are
all these massive songs that there's a good chance HEYI
is involved in them, and they're good songs right now?
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Are is there like a tell where you can tell,
especially if there's an AI generated lo fi song? Are
there tells that will you can pick that out and say, oh,
I hear this is probably AI.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Is pretty because there's not much thought put into the
AI ones where it'll be like the same couple instruments,
the exact same drum pattern, the exact same like texture
of like a synth or something, or like the same
few piano notes. I think, for me, like the easiest
way at this point from surfing through trawling through so
much content is like the text around it, like the
(29:21):
semantics of how people frame it, because they will just
have a list of songs that you can't find anywhere
else on the internet. When you're like, okay, a human
was not involved in this production.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
What do you think this says for other genres? Is
this something that's going to stop at lo fi is
or is lo fi a preview of what could happen
to other genres.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
It's not even a preview at this point. I think
it's already. Other genres are already being cannibalized in the same
way that lo fi beats have been. I think it's
really just a byproduct of the online streaming economy. It's
magical in a way the music is so immaterial and
that you can listen to anything anywhere. But you know,
(30:04):
there was something great about records and CDs and like
having to own this stuff because you were curious about
it and because you knew who the artist was. I
think now we've gone too far the other way. Music
is too accessible potentially, it's too like algorithmified, and it
just lubricates this whole environment where now AI can slip in.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
There's some things that will make me think that the
lo fi hip hop was kind of the Canardiyan the
coal mine.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Yeah. I think it's a matter of time, but also
a matter of is it gonna be an any bigger
pushback from streaming platforms, or maybe there'll just be a
parallel economy of like real music and then AI music.
Maybe the vast bulk of it or the YouTube stuff
will be AI, but then there will be this side
movement of AI free lofi.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, there will be people who want the human touch,
even for a genre that is lifeless. They want to
feel the life in it.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
I saw this YouTube video that said lo fi jungle
playlist as in like jungle and drummer bass, and I
was just curious and I thought, Oh, I wonder what
lo fi jungle sounds like. This sounds like something somebody
made up, but I'm curious to see what it sounds like.
And I listened maybe ten seconds in Yeah, and I
could tell because there was something different about the drums
(31:19):
and drums just weren't hitting right. And then I looked
in the description and this person actually disclosed it that
this was AI generated but you really had to look
down in the description to see that. But yeah, man,
sometimes I can tell and sometimes I can't. To be real,
well that's crazy.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
There's I didn't know. It's AI jungle.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
I love jungle and drum and bass me too. That's
when I started getting mad. That's when I actually got
upset because.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
I felt like, like, it's on my territory now.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
Yeah, now you're in my territory like lo fi, Okay,
you can have that jungle and I that's when I
started to really sympathize with people for whom lo fi
as a genre, as an aesthetic, as a community truly
means something. That's when I started to really feel it
because I thought, oh, this feeling that I'm feeling right now,
there's a whole bunch of people who are probably feeling
(32:07):
that exact same thing. All right, before we get out
of here, you might have listened to this and be thinking, Yo,
this dude dexter is just a lo fi hater? What's
his problem? But like I said, I have a love
hate relationship with lo fi. And I mean that because
at one point I was so annoyed with the genre
that I decided to make a low fi hip hop
(32:28):
album just to prove how whack a genre it was.
I don't know, I'm weird like that, But in the process,
I don't know, I ended up kind of liking it actually,
With the exception of that anime theme song and that
one track that I told you was AI, every lo
fi track in this episode. I made that. So you
can say whatever you want about me, but you can't
(32:49):
say I don't do my homework. And look, I get it.
Lo fi is a lot of it's just chill background music,
but there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. There's nothing wrong
with having music that's easy to make. I think it's
good to have something that's low barrier to entry. We
want more people to feel what it's like to participate
in art. Why would we gatekeep that. It's just weird
(33:12):
to know that some of the stuff that makes it
easier for us to feel human is also what makes
it so vulnerable to AI. And that's what it is
for this one. Thank you so much for listening to
kill Switch. You can email us at kill Switch at
Kaleidoscope dot NYC or we're on Instagram at kill Switch
(33:36):
pod and wherever you're listening to this, maybe leave us
a review. It helps other people find the show, which
in turn helps us keep doing our thing. Kill Switch
is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheen Ozaki,
Darluck Potts, and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by
me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show.
(33:56):
From Kaleidoscope, Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin, mangesh Ha Ho Jigadur,
and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina
Norville and Nikki E. Tor. One more thing. This whole
thing made me think about a recent episode we did
on v tubers. This is the one where I went
to a venue where there's like hundreds and hundreds of
people all hanging out watching well fake musicians. These live
(34:20):
events gathering together is one aspect of V twoing that
for now, I think is keeping that scene alive and
preventing AI from encroaching too much on that culture. And
it made me think of if something like this could
happen for lo Fi so I asked, Kieran, is there
any live aspect to any of this?
Speaker 1 (34:41):
That was something that I asked these people about because
I was very curious, and a lot of them said no,
that it was very much just like almost like an
introverts genre, like a very homebody, homespun kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Interesting, So no lo fi festival, no gathering of lo
Fi fans, like nobody can sit get in a blanket
and be cozy together or something. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Okay, there must have been, right, there must have been
like a low campfire sash somewhere, because I think the
thing about LOFI is that it is like anti energy
in a way. You know. I think that so many
of the listeners are also both scattered around the world
and they enjoyed in this passive way. They're not going
to necessarily buy a ticket to go to a LOFI
festival because they want to experience it at home.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Okay, well, I guess not. But if you do hear
of any in person Lo fi shows, let me know.
I actually think it hitting one of those up anyway,
catch on the next one.
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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