A Welsh music enthusiast has built an internet radio station that plays AI-generated tunes alongside human-made tracks without telling listeners which is which, to find out whether listeners really hate AI music or just the idea of it. AI Slop FM is the creation of Mike Chaffin, who built and runs the station single-handedly from Ammanford, Carmarthenshire. By stripping away artist names, cover art, and any mention of AI, Chaffin hopes to find out what listeners really think when they have nothing but the music to go on. The free 24/7 station asks listeners to rate tracks from S to E, tag how the music makes them feel, and leave written feedback. The most popular submissions will eventually make it into a weekly chart called the Slop 40, giving creators something that can be hard to come by in the age of streaming: an actual audience. Anyone can submit a track, including human musicians, although Chaffin has already discovered that not all of them are particularly keen on the idea. He told The Register that he had floated the idea to an unsigned musician friend who had sold around 600 albums, but was met with a rather nervous response. "Wh, wh, why would I want to do that?" the musician reportedly asked, according to Chaffin, who said he had never heard his friend stutter before. "It seems that there is a deep rooted fear of AI music in the industry," Chaffin said. The station is still in beta, with Chaffin waiting for enough submissions to fill its schedule across different genres before opening it fully. He's already been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the music submitted, although he still listens to every track to make sure nobody is trying to pass off Bohemian Rhapsody as their own work. Among the early offerings are what Chaffin describes as a developing genre of slightly rude protest songs about HR departments, along with an operatic epic about a blocked toilet. "Some of which are hilarious," he said of the HR songs. As for the toilet opera, it "runs through my head about once a day, whether I like it or not." Chaffin believes the sheer volume of music uploaded to streaming platforms means plenty of perfectly decent tracks never find an audience, whether a person or a machine made them. He hopes AI Slop FM will give some of those overlooked creations a chance to be heard. "You don't have to have published your creations to upload. Just to own the rights," he explained. Tracks that don't make the Slop 40 could still get another outing, with plans for genre-specific stations offering unsuccessful submissions a second chance. The bigger question is what happens when listeners start rating AI-generated music more highly than the human competition, but Chaffin isn't particularly worried about that. "If the machines win then their creators clearly deserve to be heard, deserve an audience. If the musicians win, then that's reassuring for them." He also wants to see how the station's eventual top five or top ten compares with the official music charts, although with submissions having only recently opened, there are no results to pore over just yet. "Everyone has an opinion on music before a note has been heard, by the genre, the label, the name or the cover art," Chaffin said. "We strip all that away, tracks are judged purely on the music." Whether listeners ultimately prefer human musicians or their algorithmically assisted rivals remains to be seen. Either way, somewhere in Carmarthenshire, an opera about a blocked toilet is proving rather difficult to flush from its listener's memory. ®
