Tim Boucher – Page 3 – Questionable content, possibly linked

“AI-Generated” Label vs. Truth Values

On 13 October 2025

There’s a user-generated content I’ve experimented with which has rules about labeling AI-generated content. Presumably they scan submitted texts for signs of that, and reject the submitted post until you fix it and/or apply the label.

When the articles thus tagged in their publish UI are made public, they have a little tag that appears at the top of the page “AI-Generated.”

I’ve got complicated opinions about this, but it will take some picking apart, so I’ll just drill down on one side of it. Telling me if something is or isn’t AI-generated does nothing to tell me about its supposed truth value, origin, agenda, author, etc. It’s a supposedly meaningful context signal that ultimately isn’t – I think – all that meaningful as a determiner of action or belief of the recipient/viewer/audience. It could be “AI-generated” and true, after a rough text gets cleaned up and formalized. And that’s still I think a good and even authentic use of AI…

So what do we really want from these labels?

(To be continued)

Sketches & Case Studies

By Tim B.

On 13 October 2025

In Other

I recorded an episode for the Audiobook Cafe podcast a few weeks back that I really enjoyed. The host, Jacob Shymanski, made a point that really hit home, regarding especially my AI lore book series. Namely, that they are like sketches or studies. They are not formally “finished” or polished or remotely perfect works. They are, in fact, deeply flawed and strange. And executed quickly in order to take advantage of and document the state of the tools used and my own thinking and creative process using them in that moment.

What I’ve done with AI music, and with media coverage around AI-related “mysteries,” I also see more or less the same way: as something like case studies, as answers to a series of what ifs that I pose to myself, and to others. Namely, what if someone else (or many someone elses) comes along and does what I did, but better – or what if they did it extremely maliciously? (Instead of merely mischievously like I have done, to capitalize on the absurdity of it all.)

Within that, I don’t offer definitive answers, explanations, or assertions. I’m not selling anything you have to believe in. I prefer if you don’t. I prefer if you make your own studies and sketches, but for better or worse, here are mine…

Fake, The New Normal

By Tim B.

On 12 October 2025

In Other

Psychology Today:

The sad reality is that believability has replaced truth as the new currency of cognition. We prize, even affirm what seems plausible, not what is proven. The fake isn’t only tolerated. It is functional and smooths the edges of uncertainty, offering just enough reality to let us keep scrolling. Just enough. […]

We once said “seeing is believing,” but that perspective has flipped. Now, believing comes first. Algorithms and filters shape our perception long before our eyes do. A fake image that aligns with our worldview feels more real than a genuine one that contradicts it.

In that sense, maybe fakery is less an act of deception than of collaboration. We participate in it, polishing the world until it reflects back a version we can live with. The fake doesn’t impose itself on us, we invite it in. Perhaps we have even become (willing or unwilling) co-authors of our illusions.

The Future Is Endless On-Device, On-Demand AI Premium Custom Content

By Tim B.

On 12 October 2025

In Other

Pretty much the title: the more AI stuff I see and work on deeply across media, it seems clear that the future is not about creating one-off AI artifacts and uploading them to various distribution services. (Though I think there’s a place for that for now as like “keyframes” or something in latent space) Instead, it is about endless, on-device, on-demand custom AI-generated completely post-reality content of any flavor anywhere anytime, with endless versions, variations, alternates, and remixes.

How to not get lost in such a sea of endless? Build a boat. There’s no other way.

Brand Nation on Post-Reality Era, Margaux Blanchard

By Tim B.

On 12 October 2025

In Other

This piece is an interesting read on the fake AI journalist known by the alias Margaux Blanchard. The whole article is worth reading, but here’s the ending:

Margaux Blanchard and the Velvet Sundown are emblematic of the ‘post-reality’ environment we now inhabit – one whereby AI agents, synthetic personas and AI-generated content intertwine with human work, often undetected. When they are exposed, they become stories in their own right and their reach grows.

The implications point to a future where trust, authorship and authenticity must be constantly interrogated.

Welcome to the post-reality era.

Distrokid has no AI label

By Tim B.

On 12 October 2025

In Other

I’ve used Distrokid a lot over the past 6 or so weeks to upload hundreds of AI-generated songs, made using Suno. And one thing I’ve seen, is that despite Spotify’s recent announcements around AI, I’ve never seen any kind of checkmark or a field for you to enter whether or not AI was used in the creation of the music. I personally don’t think it matters very much, because users will misuse and abuse whatever kinds of labeling and metadata is available – and because I think the hyperreality/post-reality era will prove that this kind of distinction won’t matter that much. AI will be baked into all digital systems, so literally everything will be made with, affected, or “authenticated” by some form of AI.

That said, some people might think that Distrokid ought to at least add a label option at time of upload. And that Spotify and other services who receive the releases could pick up and use that voluntary meta-data somehow. Maybe that’s “in the works,” but it’s long overdue. Distrokid could win points here around this. But in honesty, I don’t like Distrokid very much as every button, every page-scroll is riddled with some attempt at a highly unnecessary upsell based on scare-mongering. But still, they could just provide a checkmark “Yes, generative AI was used in this!”

FT: AI Slop Is Coming For Music

By Tim B.

On 9 October 2025

In Other

Interesting piece on Financial Times intended to prepare the music industry for the coming wave of AI slop:

That’s not so bad for streaming platforms — they are incentivised to maximise playing time, and are less concerned about who’s being listened to. But it may well marginalise existing music companies and human artists, especially where content is not particularly original, or where the fan community is less engaged.

The music industry will need to be proactive. Labels may try to create their own AI artists.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s already happening…

The other thing I want to highlight here, based on the line about “human artists” being marginalized, is that people using AI as part of their creative process *are also* “human artists.” Just because we choose one tool over another does not make us not still humans expressing creativity through the technologies made available to us in the market. It should not be an us-vs-them mentality. It should instead be a let’s look at where this is going, what we can do with it, and how should it best function in our ideal future kind of conversation…

Why Do Artists Even Need Labels?

By Tim B.

On 9 October 2025

In Other

I’ve been living under a rock (or several) for I guess some time, because everything in this Wired profile about AI artist (clankercore?) Neural Viz is new to me, except this:

Before long, the filmmaker had built an entire world with its own language, characters, and lore, all of it made with AI.

And also this sentiment:

Many commenters on YouTube told Kerrigan that his videos should be on Adult Swim. But when he met with producers affiliated with Adult Swim, he said, one of them suggested that he might not need them; that the power had shifted to creators. “That sentiment has come up multiple times in meetings with other various studios,” Kerrigan said.

This seems all too familiar, and has got me wondering the existential question of, why does an artist today even need a label? What exactly does that get them? Reach? Engagement? You can get those things on social media, in the press directly, by actually engaging with other humans. Without any kinds of obligations to a third party. All you need is a distributor, a platform, and some means of generating the materiel. And of course getting paid for it (but which ideally happens at the same place you upload).

I was surprised that instead of focusing on a not that good “Studio” experience, that they didn’t just make the much more obvious and in my mind probably more lucrative business step of offering distribution services, direct transloading your content out to Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube, etc. Maybe that’s in the works, but to me that’s much more valuable and a time saver than another AI editing experience that is tedious and somewhat user-friendly with unpredictable mid results. Just let me make my stuff, send it out, get paid, and get the hell out of my way. This is the way.

So what really could labels offer artists that’s the most valuable? Budgets for marketing, access to good editors and tools, budget and eng/ux team to build out custom tools for production. There are probably more, but that’s off the top of my head. Will give this more careful consideration as I digest this Wired piece more!

Ragebait Marketing

By Tim B.

On 8 October 2025

In Other

I thought this article from The Verge was a bit on the “too much” side, about AI actress Tilly Norwood and how the whole thing is a “psyop.” I haven’t overly closely followed the Norwood saga, just from afar via following Google Alerts around various AI in the arts topics. It just seems like not a big deal to me at all, and also an absolute inevitability as we watch the early AI-generated stars begin to rise. If we can call them that…

I recently found a precursor example of this sort of gambit from a couple years ago, called Noonoouri – an AI-assisted animated character that allegedly signed a record deal with Warner in 2023. It was such a big deal, apparently, that I never even heard of it before the other day. I guess I see Norwood in a similar light:

Which is not to say there’s no place for this sort of thing. I think there is. It’s just not something that grabs my attention when I see it. It’s just another meh in the endless smorgasbord of mixed lukewarm platters of gen AI leftovers.

Speaking of, I also enjoy tracking requests from journalists for sources on Qwoted around generative AI and I saw this one, but arrived home too late to pitch them:

NATION’S RESTAURANT NEWS

Digital marketing and social analytics experts on AI-manufactured outrage

Bots and AI were behind the Cracker Barrel scandal– what can we learn from this?
I’m looking for digital marketing and social media analytics experts to talk about the bombshell that nearly half of all X posts about the Cracker Barrel rebranding controversy were from bots and AI, meaning that at least part of the outrage was manufactured.
I want to write a story on what this means, how common it is, and how other brands can avoid falling for those same pitfalls.

While I heard about the Cracker Barrel thing in a general way, I’ve not yet been exposed to this angle of alleged bot/AI etc involvement to manufacture outrage.

But my pitch would have been something about how we shouldn’t be looking for how brands can avoid those pitfalls, but how brands will ultimately embrace actively using these tactics themselves. While it’s shitty, I think it’s sort of an inevitability as we see more and more that those kinds of sub rosa ragebait campaigns are simply effective at driving attention. The question would then become more about how not to get burned as a brand while playing with fire.

Probably that’s not a message that Nation’s Restaurant News is going to be ready to re-transmit to its readership, but it’s the world we’re rapidly entering, and that we’re already in, like it or not.

The Problem With AI Is People

By Tim B.

On 7 October 2025

In Other

I’ve started talking to the media about my new AI music project, and will reveal more details as those pieces start to get published.

What I can say now is I’ve spent the last 6 or so weeks heavily using Suno AI. And while I’ve found ways to make the models (especially v4.5+) give results that I think can be pretty good sometimes, my experience overall is that the product and user experience side of the service are pretty terrible. Which is why I’m walking away from it and deleting my account. But also because that project is finished, and I like to be able to make clean breaks after things are finished, in order to open up space for new things to come along.

Apart from a pretty rough ride using the actual service, I’ve come to realize something somewhat unfortunate after observing and interacting with other users in the Suno community on Reddit. And this might come off as harsh, but I think might need to be said out loud. I’ve become as a result of those interactions fairly convinced that much of the problems we ascribe to AI are less about AI and more simply problems of the people using the AI.

To put it even more bluntly: I think the reason that so much of AI music seems to suck, is that, well, unfortunately, the attitude and aesthetic choices that the people are bringing to the creation of AI music, well… sucks. This applies equally I’m sure across other modalities and service offerings related to AI. It’s not strictly a Suno issue, but for whatever reason, that is where the issue became crystal clear for me: sucky people make sucky things, whether using AI or not. I don’t really like making such blanket statements about groups of people, and there are always endless exceptions to generalities like that. But the amount of weird dumb infighting and pointless belittling and smugness that I witnessed in that “community” when people bring up legitimate concerns around the product offering makes me not too keen on being part of that community.

Maybe this is a variant of “looking for love in all the wrong places” and I’m asking too much from an online group of people dedicated to making mostly to vulgar, joke, or derivative songs. But I think we as artists can do better, and that our discourse needs to be better. That we need to challenge the limits and each other to get to where we’re going, and rise to the next level of wherever these AI tools are leading us. Probably Reddit is the wrong place to do that, obviously. Probably much of the internet is, in fact, the wrong place for that. But what and where is the right place? Does it exist? Maybe it can and should only exist in small close knit friend networks, Signal groups and the like. Those remain near and dear to my heart.

But the sentiment remains for me regardless: people with annoying attitudes and bad aesthetics make things that are annoying and aesthetically bad. And the problem with AI is not merely the technology and its many issues (and I believe there are many real & important ones). But the problem, like everything, is people. And just like with anything, you get out what you put in. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes… So let’s maybe stop putting garbage in, and see what comes out the other side? Just an idea!