The singularity is defined by futurists as the moment when computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence. For 5 Mag, the singularity was the moment that the work necessary to filter out computer-generated slop began to take more energy than the actual work itself.
This isn’t a rant as much as a forensic reconstruction of a slow-motion car crash. In the last six months, basically every system 5 Mag built here in 20 years to interface with the public and the music community has broken down. They no longer work. Barring society-wide changes — electrical rationing, the collapse of the dollar, etc. — they will never work again. Things like open submissions, public-facing emails — none of it is sustainable in the world anymore. People have discovered access to enormous computing power at a minimal price, and are using it to waste everyone’s time.
The age of AI didn’t turn humanity into slaves. It turned us into janitors, constantly cleaning up after the careless.
The singularity does not come how you would expect it. I once feared we’d find ourselves overwhelmed by the flood of AI-generated shitty music. There’s plenty of shitmusic to be sure, but that’s only part of the larger problem. Every input we have to connect with the public — forms for calendar submissions, pitches for artist features and gear, emails for music submissions and of course the music itself — has been flooded, rendered inoperable more thoroughly than any denial of service attack could have done. Unlike a flood of bad traffic that brings down a website, there’s no way to shut off the sewage pipe of AI-generated trash.
Rent-Seeking Spambots.
Here’s an example. A year ago we wrote about a scam in which sleazy operations are abusing public event listings at scale to skim off a profit from live music events around the world. They submit events to sites and platforms as if they are the legitimate venue or promoter, though they have no connection to either. The payload is that they substitute their own affiliate links to expensive tickets on reseller platforms like StubHub in place of the legitimate ticket link from the venue, which has ample and cheaper tickets available. They were doing this for events all around the world, from stadium concerts in Los Angeles to community theater in Lancaster, PA.
The effect is that the public is paying more for shows and a spam operator in Ukraine (and of course the reselling platforms, which incentivize such behavior) are skimming money from the live music scene.
People have discovered access to enormous computing power at a minimal price, & are using it to waste everyone’s time.
We had discovered just one crafty outfit in Kyiv doing this. Today there are at least a dozen operations throwing the same “scabmission” affiliate scheme at us. Their submissions are automated and generated faster than any human can process them. And, to repeat, there are at least a dozen operations sending them. We received seven separate “event submissions” for Beyond Wonderland, an EDM festival in Chicago, but none from Insomniac, the actual promoter. They were all pimping their links to reseller sites. We’ve gotten scam submissions for nearly every venue in Chicago that sells advanced tickets, all using obscuring URLs to cloak their origin.
In the past, we filtered these scams out quickly. It wasn’t that hard because they didn’t quite look right. But things generated by AI, at a glance, usually do look right. Today it actually takes more time for our staff to suss out a scam event than it does to post a real one.
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We didn’t realize what was happening at first. An hour going through submissions suddenly turned into three, with a lot of stuff left over. Everything seemed to be taking longer while less actual work was being completed. And it was everything that could be faked and automated via AI agents: music submissions, calendar events, fake freelance articles sent to our submission box, sadboy “entrepreneurs” selling sample packs generated on Suno. In one 3 hour period, we received 16 AI-generated emails submitting AI-generated music, some of them intentionally misleading (tracks from “Masters of Work” were surprising, in more ways than one). This was in the middle of Memorial Day weekend, a holiday, but AI agents never sleep, their owners always making messes that need to be cleaned up. The age of AI didn’t turn humanity into slaves. It turned us into janitors.
Riding the Slopwave.
For awhile we just skimmed and deleted, which was about as much of a “filter” as we ever needed. That’s no longer feasible. You can’t filter AI-generated slop as efficiently as they can dump more of it in front of you.
If anything, it’s even harder to engage with this stuff when it comes to music submissions. Music submissions are the lifeblood of what we do here — they start the process that leads to everything we write about. But at a glance, a music submission from an unknown artist looks identical to one authored by AI. It’s only after you devote your full attention to it that you note the meaningless pile of dynamic adverbs and insincere flattery, the music that sounds like it was recorded with butcher paper taped over the speakers because it was trained on low-quality mp3s.
Oddly, one of the tells that you’re reading AI-generated text is to measure how insanely polite it is, sparkling with over-the-top praise that initially flatters but completely unravels into a slop bucket of undercooked verbiage when you stop to think about what you just read. Here’s a real opening of one we got from a company that makes software for DJs:
That was sent by an email account belonging to what appears to be a real Dutch developer named “Reint Jan.” The email, however, was signed with the name “Emma Walters.” Reint Jan got his own name wrong in his AI-generated pitch for his DJ slopware. Think of how much electricity has to be burned every day to make such an incredibly stupid man seem even passingly interesting.
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And yet even still: a bad first impression is unfortunate, but we’d already spent the time evaluating this and figured we’d see if we could strike up a real connection. Reint Jan/Emma Walters was asked if he/she/they could reformulate their pitch without using ChatGPT. He/she/they never replied, so the answer is no. In our experience, the answer is always no. It’s weird. It seems that when you start to interact with the world entirely through prompts, you’re no longer willing to and maybe not even able to engage without chatbot assistance.
Starting From Zero.
Some of the people responsible for this are clearly thieves and scammers, but others would have been our peers in a less sociopathic age. They’ve somehow imagined that rather than try to connect with 20 people, they’ll deploy insane computing power to spam thousands. Rather than put in just a little work tempered by their own taste and experience, they’ll outsource creation and sign their name to it. The real AI psychosis is when you convince yourself nobody notices.
That’s already an old argument, but plenty see nothing wrong with this — that wasting the time of humans with bot-generated junk is fine. Maybe they’ve never been on the receiving end of 100 AI-generated pitches in a day. Or they’re sociopaths. Unfortunately tech has made a lot more of those too.
o o o
So what do we do? How we operated for the last decade doesn’t work anymore. Email as a useful medium of open communication is now largely defunct. The most obvious solution here is to build obstructions — create barriers to entry that divert the great garbage flood of 2026. The problem is that eliminating this shit would also wipe out the kind of open communication 5 Mag thrives on, including our championing of obscure or young underground talent.
5 Mag always had an open submission policy and it’s hard to imagine operating a music platform without that. We made fun of the elite magazines and even the DJs whose idea of “what’s hot” is limited to what people pay them to play or what shows up as a free promo. Being open is the right thing to do, but it’s impossible now without hiring a staff of 20 just to filter out AI-generated trash. And at the current rate, that staff of 20 will be drowning in even more AI slop in a few months and require 20 more.
Our goal used to be to clear 100% of the submissions we were sent. It was aspirational, of course, and it became increasingly unrealistic as the tempo of submissions accelerated over the last decade.
Today that goal is not aspirational or even desirable. You shouldn’t be obligated to spend your time on people who are determined to waste it.
Starting next month, we’ll be implementing some new systems we’ve been working on that might help us get close to that goal. Labels, artists and their reps will be able to submit music directly to our staff — just drag-and-drop, one step and you’re done. This will be for VIPs only, but in a universe in which “VIPs” are basically defined as “people we’re pretty sure really exist.”
Our members really exist, and will be first in line.
The new goal is to spend 100% of our time on music and people and things that are real. That goal is also aspirational, but we think it’s one that’s worth shooting for.
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