Things which purport to include everything keep reminding me how small the world is. For instance, the suno.com/explore website includes a palette with a few hundred different music genres you can try out with their model. There’s just so many ways to mix genres, invent new ones from scratch, or generate entire orchestral arrangements of instruments that don’t exist.

But also, the website is so very small. Why only a few hundred? Why do so few sound perfectly good to me? Why must human imagination be so limited? Why is there only one Hans Zimmer? Why aren’t there more musicians being trained specifically to make “ostrich eggs and various other random stuff we found in the Australian bush” their instrument of choice? Why is no-one trying to rival Mozart with more random biological detritus?

As always the answer is something like “well if there were a lot more humans and we all had much more time on our hands, this would be more likely to happen by itself” which as usual brings up the usual directive “you there, might consider working on there being more humans and making those humans wealthier”.

But it’s not the only solution… Suno dot com, for instance, is bringing up what Earth is actually gravitating towards as a solution for “maybe the market wants unlimited songs from unlimited genres”.

Namely, more resources are being directed toward AI homes rather than human homes. You don’t need to painstakingly employ humans to generate your music and do it inefficiently, when you could just get a generative model to do it for you.

With only 8 billion humans out there, this is the only tenable solution. The market can only satisfy so many obscure tastes when the market is so unbearably tiny. (Surely, if Earth had a trillion humans on it, there would be more music to listen to and Mozarts to patronize.)

And so we turn to what is to us, at the moment, “AI slop”. Currently, without excessive personalization, AI outputs aren’t entirely satisfying as replacements for what all those humans that don’t exist yet would be doing. Earth2025 with its Suno dot coms and Chat dot coms is therefore significantly poorer than a counterfactual Earth where there were 80 billion people rather than 8…

But with tfr in freefall, AI activities actively fighting against tfr, and AI progress barreling forward fast enough that soon it won’t be “slop” to us anymore, the status quo of “solve our lack of abundance through generative AI” will only get worse. The cybergogglepunk future awaits us as what seems to be the default.

Be warned! As the ratio of humans:AI making art falls ever further, humans will ever grow apart.