In 2024 I wrote an article about a trend of AI generated surf music that I had been finding on bandcamp. It resonated with a lot of people inside and even outside the surf community. Since then AI has grown from emerging technology we'll likely only see more of to an omnipresent chaotic disruptor that weasels its way into relevance on a daily basis. But specific to surf music, things have changed. I'm happy to say that the surf community seems a lot more aware, and are shouting down AI when posted in social media surf groups. For a while it seemed like things weren't accelerating at the pace I expected. But then we were slammed with a single actor abusing AI to defraud multiple surf artists.
But that will be in a different post that I'm publishing at the same time as this. Most of this article was written in May, and for whatever reason I didn't publish it. The developments in the other article are way more chaotic and alarming than what I mention here, which is why it's in its own article, but I still want to mention these.
My radar is getting better, but so is the AI.
Much like AI generated images, when they were new they were convincing, but now they often stick out in an instant. Drums that sound like Kazaa-era MP3s. Lack of sonic uniformity from song to song. Putting out way too much material in a short amount of time. Lack of even basic evidence that humans were involved.
But there have been some that came pretty close to fooling me.
The Weird And Twisted Music of DICK WILD - Unreleased Tracks 1964/1979
The cover art features a person that doesn't look like AI, with graphic design that looks like oh so many bootleg compilations I've seen. The music is raw and wild, primitive with the earlier tracks and getting a bit more psychedelic towards the end. It's fun! It had me thinking "Why have I not heard of this guy before?" And there was a time when I would have thought "because you haven't heard of everything", which remains very true, but these days I'm doubting the content first. The bandcamp page says Italy, but I've heard Italian music from this era and he would have been a heck of an outlier. And the name seems a little on the nose... oh wait. It actually says right in the description of the bandcamp page, "Music Created by UDIO AI". I appreciate the transparency. I'm pretty impressed by how convincingly it can rip off Link Wray though. I suppose the expected low-fi sound masks a lot of AI's tells.
Invasion of the Beach Creeps
When you're listening to a little bit of every surf record you can find, especially unsolicited, you're looking for some reason to care. This band clearly had AI imagery, but that's more of a confirmation of low effort than AI music. They say they're from Michigan, two brothers and friends recording to 8 track in a basement. I put it on while doing other things, nothing grabs me, I move on.
A week later I see them pop up again with an LP. This is cause for suspicion. Sure, maybe a band decides to finally join bandcamp and put it all up at once, but AI bands tend to release much faster than humans. I listen more closely... low bitrate, every track sounds like a different band, drums sometimes sound like a drum machine and the tone can be kinda weird. One of the songs features an old horror movie audio clip, but I suppose if AI can write country songs with filthy lyrics it can pull that off too. But this is one of the first times I've seen what I assume to be an AI project listing band members and a credible bio (though the part of their bio that says "We are not really a band that plays shows, just a group of friends that dig the surfy sounds") is about as damning as it is folksy. They had a facebook page too, which is more than most of these groups do, but I can't find it anymore. I've tried to look up the people listed as members but didnt' find anybody living near Detroit.
Maybe I'm nuts. If they're a real band, sorry about this awful review. But I'm highlighting this just to point out that while they didn't put a ton of effort in, there are people trying to deceive you.
Gray Area? AI Collaborators
And here we have something with elements of both of the above. Guitarra Del Pasado claims to be "A project by producer Jason Moore, spotlighting the collective works of Spanish surf guitarist Geno Valaris. 1966-1968". The bio picture shows a guitarist with a 60's look, standing in front of waves, holding the guitar neck with six fingers. I bet that helps! I'm not sure that description was even there when I first heard this, I just saw Seattle, Washington and that they had an actual physical CD for sale, which made me think it might be real despite the album cover showing a gigantic wave seemingly originating from the sand and crashing into the sea instead of the other way around. Again, real bands use AI imagery, I just thought this one was extra dumb.
So I listened and some of the signs of AI were going off, the guitar sounded better than I'd expect. But I certainly was getting the low bitrate effect. So I emailed and got a reply from Jason.
Guitarra Del Pasado is half AI, and half human, as in myself. I don't have a band, so I created one using an AI platform, downloaded the stems, mixed it, then added guitar. The low bit rate sound comes naturally from the AI itself.
I understand if you don't want to play it on your show because of that. But, I would appreciate it if you did.
I get this. Being in a band is hard. It must feel nice to just play your instrument without finding band members, figuring out their schedules, keeping enough beer stocked, etc. I mean, I think having friends, collaborating with them, and making something together is pretty cool too. But this makes more sense to me than most uses. I'm sure he's far from the only person that's done this too.
I won't go so far as saying "this is a good use of AI". In addition to reasons I'll go into at the end, I don't appreciate deceiving potential buyers into believing there's historical significance to your works. Quite the opposite, I think if you use AI, you should say so, and let the listener decide if they're OK with that.
AI filling gaps?
Rick Deliz of the band Secret Agent has been putting out a ton of huge compilations that are mostly surf music. They're free and they're great samplers of lesser-known surf bands. I was going through the track list and saw a band I hadn't heard: Jamaican Surfalites. It sounded like AI to me. So I listened to some more on Youtube and yeah, absurd amount of material (240 songs), a lot of variety, AI imagery everywhere. No question that they're AI. I message Rick and asked if he was aware. He was! And he pointed out that their youtube bio mentions it too (though it does say "A dash of AI magic" -- I think it's a bit more than "a dash"). He said he thinks it's interesting though.
And goddammit, I get it. I've gotten people asking me for surf music that blends in dub, and while I can name an album or song here or there (especially if I bend the rules and let ska in), I never feel like I have a great answer for them. And right here we have literally hundreds of tracks that do feel like what they're asking for. I don't think it's great, but I wish I had something else to suggest.
AI Remixes
I play a decent amount of video games, and the music from some of these games are as dear to me as anything else. So I enjoy the novelty of hearing them different ways. For instance, this album of cumbia versions of popular video game songs.
That's AI. Although amusingly, I didn't realize it at first because I was scanning the spanish descriptions for mentions of it and didn't realize that Artifical Intelligence in Spanish would be Inteligencia Artificial and therefore abbreviated to IA. I barely speak any Spanish so this wasn't immediately obvious.
I've only noticed one example of this in surf, and it's from a game that I didn't play and therefore have no real attachment to: Batman for NES.
And I gotta say, this is probably the most beguiling form of AI music to me. We know up-front that the core of the songs themselves come from an actual creative human. I played plenty of DOS games where how the music sounded depended on the MIDI controller on your sound card, so I'm used to video game songs sort of wearing different clothes. Obviously I'd prefer to listen to people doing this but every once in a while the AI drops a nugget, like this shoegaze version of a song from Donkey Kong Country 3.
Paranoia
The fact that I now have a Turing test built into my music evaluation process means I come across things that I do think are real, but if there's anything off it really nags at me.
Ghoul Guy released two LPs in one month, though that month was October so it would make sense for him to save go nuts during that time as a horror musician. Art is AI though with more graphic design than most. The music... kinda sounds like it could go either way. But he has a gmail account. I mean that's not hard, but it's more effort than most. He made a not-AI promo video on his facebook page.
Meanwhile I gave a Gremmy honorable mention to High Tides - Paperback Romance. I really don't think this is AI, at least not fully. The songs feel way too meaningfully written. But everything else is suspect. They're on a "label" with a bandcamp bio that just says "?????", the album notes just list download codes for an album that's name-your-price, and I can find no other hints at this band existing. In fact, it no longer does exist! It's been taken off bandcamp. Basically a lot of things about it are, as the kids say, "sus". And what is there to be sus about other than being AI? I enjoy this record enough to endorse it, but I wish I didn't have to hold back my feelings for fear of whatever deception might be afoot.
Why all of this is bad
As all of us have, I've thought a lot more about AI since I wrote my original article (and a lot of people sent some interesting links too). At the time my main aversion was more gut-level: humans good, computers bad. And I'm somebody that's always been fascinated by technology, but I suppose it was because it reflects the work of clever humans on the other end. AI steals that work and obfuscates its origins. But there's more than that. We're being sold AI so that it'll go down easier when it replaces jobs. But still, that's not especially relevant here. This is:
AI is waste.
Instead of the Star Trek post-need society, we've created a hoarder's society of more content than we ever could need, and we anti-solved this problem by creating a means to crank out mediocre meaningless content with minimal effort. The reason you probably haven't heard the records mentioned in this article is because they're not worth hearing. The term "AI slop" has emerged, and yeah, these feel just as valueless as that term suggests. But even if they were excellent, there's enough human-generated content that you haven't heard, and I know this because in the surf realm I am probably trying harder than you to find it and I have no sense of approaching the end. And that's just surf music. Zoom out to all of music, then podcasts, films, TV, articles talking about AI (thank you for reading). There is enough stuff out there to hold your attention, but the seemingly boundless storage space of the internet says "what's a little bit more?". Why not create something out of AI, just out of curiosity?
But this hoarder's house of an internet is already so full of junk that it's burying the stuff that's worth it. Thankfully this doesn't apply to surf yet, but I'm sure you've tried to google something along the lines of "best vacuum cleaner 2025" and had only AI-writted blogspam to choose from. And those articles are so obnoxious and riddled with ads that ironically it feels like the best answer is for ChatGPT to do the searching for you, cut through the chaff and give you the good stuff. It's like being in a small unventilated room with only a refrigerator inside. The refrigerator will heat up the room to an unbearable level, so the only option you have is to open the refrigerator door to cool yourself off. The solution to the problem is to utilize the problem.
And the worst thing about that analogy is that it barely qualifies as an analogy. AI is not just creating digital waste, but is an enormous ecological waste. You likely already know that, but here's a site to give you an idea, and keep in mind that these numbers are only going to go up as it's used more. So these wasteful songs that nobody really wants and nobody really created are not only wasting your time, but wasting energy.
I still feel pretty gloomy about all this, but maybe less so than before. AI screws up so much, that I have to believe that resistance will only mount rather than get exhausted. I saw that the Chicago Sun Times released a summer book list with only five real titles. That's inexcusable, and you might think "AI will get better at this in time", but I'm doubtful. Why would AI know that there's no Dick Wild or Geno Valaris? When we're dumping so much AI slop into the internet, it's only natural that AI will eat that slop. I think we're going to start valuing trust more and more, and you can only get that from people, and I want to believe that there's going to be demand for more overtly human content. Please.
