As audio-focused generative tools and platforms have gotten more sophisticated, the internet has become increasingly filled with AI-generated music whose melodies and vocals are algorithmically derived from the work of human artists. While some of the people pumping out this kind of content immediately own up to using AI, others have denied using the technology until increasing public scrutiny forced them to tell the truth. 

For musicians — especially those creating art in technologically-focused spaces like electronic dance music — the increasingly complicated question of what is “real” and what isn’t feels particularly urgent and personal. Professional courtesy can make this only more complex;  listeners can call out performers they suspect of using gen AI, but it’s something else for artists to raise concerns about their professional peers. There are some though, like 26-year-old EDM producer Max “H4RRIS” Harris, who are taking a stand against generative technology with videos calling out anyone they believe is trying to pass off AI slop as human-made art.

When I recently spoke with Harris, he told me that he sees AI-generated music as “a kind of decoy art form,” and he thinks that the people making it don’t really have anything meaningful to say with their creations. He feels that true art in any medium is “created by people that are trying to express feelings and messages,” and he believes that the only thing AI boosters are really interested in is making a quick profit.

“I don’t consider AI-generated material to be art, and I don’t think this technology is really advancing art in any meaningful way,” Harris said. “It’s a technological advancement that’s giving people a way to steal real art and pass it off as their own.”

Harris, originally from Maine, described his approach to making music as being fairly similar to working in other creative mediums. He always begins with a core concept before he starts “throwing more ideas down until I find something that sticks.” And as complicated as his workflow might look to someone unfamiliar with all of the tools and programs that he uses — his production setup includes Ableton Live, Novation Launchkey 49 MIDI controller, Ableton Push 3, Launchpad X, a couple of analog synthesizers, Serum, Diva, and the software sampler Kontakt — he said that the entire process is “really just me making creative decisions” that culminates in a sound that feels right.

“Each of those decisions — and there’s hundreds of them to go into each song — brings me closer to evoking a specific kind of idea or emotion,” Harris explained. “And then once I have a song mapped out, I have to start making even more choices about how to mix it in a way that makes it sound good and presentable.”

In Harris’ view, being a real artist means being able to make those kinds of experimental but informed creative decisions using your own studied understanding of a given medium. One of Harris’ biggest issues with gen AI is the way the technology often eliminates a user’s need to think about how songs (or books, films, podcasts, etc.) come together. But he has also been dismayed at the way that AI posers are muddying listeners’ understanding of what human-made EDM actually sounds like. 

“Aside from the similar vocals, you can usually hear a sharp hissing throughout the track,” Harris said of AI-generated songs. “I think that comes from the way that these models often work by starting with a big white noise block and then making guesses about waveforms by referencing data taken from real songs.”

Harris pointed to MANSA’s “Midnight on My Mind” and Danny and Ian Asher’s “Take Me (To The Moon)” as what he thinks are examples of AI-produced songs that embody what he jokingly refers to as “the AI revolution” that’s responsible for polluting the EDM space. MANSA, Danny, and Asher have not publicly commented on whether they use generative tools in their music. But Harris and other EDM fans have noticed the similarities between “Take Me (To The Moon)” and another person’s AI-generated track. There’s no definitive evidence that MANSA produced “Midnight on My Mind” with AI. Harris could very well be wrong about these songs being generated with AI. But his insistence that they are reflects the larger culture of mistrust that has developed in response to the growing presence of AI content online.

Harris holds AI production company Suno responsible for the recent spike in this kind of music being uploaded to the internet, but he also credits specific quirks of the platform for helping him learn how to spot songs worth calling out.

“Something I’ve noticed with a lot of Suno-generated tracks is that a lot of the time, you’ll hear the vocals and other melodic elements will start stuttering at the same exact time,” Harris explained. “These models still have a hard time fully separating different parts of the songs they’re trained on, and they treat these elements like one big instrument. As a music producer, all of these things come across like choices that a human just wouldn’t make with their compositions because it just doesn’t make sense.”

In some instances, the visuals accompanying AI tracks are part of what prompts Harris to accuse people of slinging AI. You might not be able to hear the generative models behind evangelical Christian AI persona Lionsaddle’s music, but you can clearly see the character’s fingers vanishing in and out of existence in videos. There is also an overly glossy visual quality to most of the videos posted by Christian house musician Midnite Manna that makes their content look a lot like what we typically refer to as AI slop.

Suno also came up multiple times during my conversation with 39-year-old Italian turntabilist-turned-producer Nihil Young. Young’s posts on Threads about people using Suno are what initially inspired Harris to make his videos. Like Harris, Young has spent the past few months watching multiple EDM newcomers’ stars rise after they post music he thinks was generated with AI tools like Suno’s. And while Young isn’t usually one to get involved with online discourse, he felt it was important to speak out about how many people are flooding the scene with AI tracks.

“These songs are the sound of Suno, which to me means that the people behind the songs are just straight up uploading original, copyrighted tracks of artists like Madonna and asking the platform to remix them,” Young told me, referring to Josh Fawaz’s “Like a Prayer” cover, which now includes AI credits following a wave of online backlash. “If they can do it with major artists like her, they can do it with you, me, and everyone else, which just isn’t cool. They can take your entire catalog, feed it to Suno, and generate ‘new’ songs from that stolen work.”

Young claimed that in response to his Threads posts, he received multiple hacking attempts and a wave of online harassment from AI defenders. He also told me that he thinks people bought fake followers to boost his Spotify numbers as a way of casting doubt on his authenticity. That spooked Young — who is raising a young daughter and just put out a new album of his own — to rethink whether he should continue. He’s taken a break from callouts, but he still thinks it’s important to know about the way AI music is harming human artists.

“Music production is where most of my income comes from, and almost as soon as AI began rolling out, I started losing many of my clients,” said Young, who has previously done audio mixing and mastering work for Sony Music, Warner, and Universal. “I can only imagine what it’s been like for singers, graphics artists, and people working in other creative fields. Whether you realize it or not, this stuff is impacting everyone.”

What Young wishes more listeners could appreciate is how easy it has become to generate entire songs with platforms like Suno. In his opinion, most people using AI to make music “aren’t actually doing anything creative and they don’t have a true artistic process” because many generative tools on the market involve some degree of autogeneration. When I brought up how detailed AI prompts can be, he insisted that many of the people posting AI music likely aren’t even writing their own inputs. Young noted that Suno’s Simple Mode allows users to whip up songs by simply selecting a musical genre and clicking a button — a process that requires basically zero thinking. (Suno has not responded to a request for comment in time for publication.)

As much as traditional artists might loathe generative production, there is no denying that AI songs are making their way into the mainstream. In 2024, Metro Boomin took shots at Drake with a beat sampling comedian King Willonius’ “BBL Drizzy” — an AI track whose vocals, melodies, and instrumental elements were generated by AI music startup Udio. Metro Boomin’s “BBL Drizzy” went viral after the producer posted the beat to SoundCloud and invited other performers to rap over it. Drake subsequently rapped over the beat himself on Sexyy Red’s  “U My Everything,” and that song managed to peak at 44 on the Billboard Hot 100. 

Wholly AI-generated songs (and people) are finding success, as well. Last summer, Vinih Pray’s Suno-created song “A Million Colors” also peaked at 44 on TikTok’s Viral 50 chart, and AI artists Breaking Rust and Cain Walker made it onto Billboard’s Country Digital Song sales chart — a lesser-known chart focusing on individual song downloads. Meanwhile, Hallwood Media — a label founded by former Geffen Records president Neil Jacobson — signed AI avatar Xania Monet to a $3 million recording deal. Certain segments of the industry are clearly trying to normalize AI-generated music, and people are definitely making money with their machine-generated tracks. Kapwing estimates that the top 10 most followed / streamed AI music creators on Spotify and YouTube collectively raked in over $6 million in 2025. And with platforms like Deezer reporting that AI songs now account for over 50 percent of new uploads, that kind of music is getting harder for listeners to avoid — if they can even recognize it. While streaming platforms are beginning to more clearly label AI songs, many listeners have reported that they can’t really hear the difference between generative and human-made music.

Aside from the people uploading all of these songs, no one has a way of being absolutely certain whether the tracks were generated with AI or made by an actual artist. AI music detection tools are one potential solution, but it’s not entirely clear how and, perhaps more importantly, if listeners might incorporate them into their lives. Judging by the numbers (which, of course, can be manipulated with paid streams), there do seem to be people who don’t mind the sounds of Suno and other AI tools. Young knows that most people’s ears probably aren’t well-attuned to identifying audio slop, but he still thinks that music lovers owe it to themselves to make the effort to find real, human artists.

“In my opinion, it becomes obvious that you’re listening to AI-generated music when you put on a good pair of headphones,” Young told me. “But I also think that a lot of people these days are consuming music like fast food and listening to it through the speakers on their phone. Or they just have it on a background noise, and they don’t necessarily care what it sounds like.”

The version of The X-Files: I Want to Believe that premiered in 2008 was not exactly the movie co-writer / director Chris Carter intended to make. Carter wanted to bring agents Mulder and Scully back to the big screen with a grisly story about faith and the supernatural. But executives at 20th Century Fox felt that Carter’s ideas were too dark, and he was pushed to turn the project into a PG-13 feature. Now, almost two decades after I Want to Believe’s theatrical debut, Carter is back with a new director’s cut of the film for Hulu that’s much closer to his original vision. 

“We got to tell a good X-Files story,” Carter said of the original cut during a recent conversation we had about the new release. ”We just didn’t get to tell it in the way that we had intended.”

The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn’s Russian subtitle is meant to clue you into how heavily the movie leans into the series’ monster of the week-style storytelling. Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) find themselves unwittingly investigating a string of gruesome kidnappings with the help of a predatory priest (Sir William Connolly) who claims to have psychic visions. Neither of the agents know what to make of the man’s supposed abilities, but they can’t ignore the way he consistently leads the FBI to dismembered body parts hidden in the frozen, West Virginian wilderness.

The new cut of I Want to Believe puts an emphasis on its Frankenstein elements that almost makes it feel like 20th Century Studios wanted to tap into Hollywood’s recent fascination with reimagining Mary Shelley’s seminal sci-fi novel. But Carter told me that he thinks his version is actually exploring some of the real world horrors that are woven into people’s desperate searches for youth and immortality. 

“There’s this tech bro idea that if you do the right things and eat the right things, you might be able to live forever and ever,” Carter explained. “But if you’re able to transplant your head successfully onto younger and younger bodies, who’s to say that’s not everlasting life?”

While writing I Want to Believe back in the early aughts, Carter was inspired by the work of Robert J. White — a neurosurgeon and bioethicist who successfully managed to transplant the head of one living monkey onto another’s body in the 1970s. Before White’s death in 2010, Carter met with him in Ohio to speak about his work, and their conversation informed some of I Want to Believe’s beats. With Vrach Frankenshteyn, Carter wanted to highlight the visceral sense of fear that might be felt by someone undergoing experiments similar to White’s. The new cut spends less time focusing on Mulder and Scully’s personal relationship, and puts more of its energy into making you feel the terror of its victim characters.

“You have these women who have been stalked, violently taken from their cars, and then trapped in boxes, where they witness these terrible medical procedures they’re going to be subjected to,” Carter said. “If the audience now comes into this movie thinking about head transplants and this title, plot details like finding an arm in the ice and snow brings them into this story in a different way.”

Though I Want to Believe was met with mixed reviews when it first hit theaters, the series continued with two revival seasons on Fox that ran from 2016 to 2018. Those seasons and the rise of digital streaming brought a new generation of viewers into the X-Files fandom. Carter told me that he’s regularly surprised to meet young people who feel a deep connection to the world he created even though they weren’t alive when the show was originally airing. Carter appreciates that, for those fans, The X-Files is something they’re experiencing for the first time, and it’s markedly different from the new generation of streaming sci-fi series. 

Carter — who’s currently working with his wife, Dori, on a movie about a woman forced to live her mother’s life in the 1950s titled Queens for a Day — knows the pleasure of watching truly original and distinct stories unfold. That’s why he has tried to keep himself in the dark about what Ryan Coogler is cooking up with his own upcoming spin on The X-Files. That said, while shooting Queens for a Day in Vancouver, Carter couldn’t stop some of the members from his production crew from visiting Coogler’s nearby set. And while Carter insisted about being kept in the dark about any “secret inside information,” he has faith that Coogler is going to “bring his stamp” to the franchise.

“Ryan is a filmmaker I completely respect,” Carter said. “I’ve made a point of not reading [his script] because
I want to watch it like everyone else. But I’ve got an inkling about what he’s doing with his approach and this diverse cast, and it’s very exciting to me.”

The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn is now streaming on Hulu.

In less than a week, Spider-Man: Brand New Day raked in $1 billion worldwide and had the biggest box office opening weekend in Hollywood history. The feature has been a reminder of why Sony is probably never going to give up the Spider-Man film rights, and highlighted how Marvel Studios was smart to strike a deal to bring the character into its own films. But as successful as Brand New Day has been, the larger MCU has been stuck in a confounding slump for the past few years. And while this latest Spider-Man movie was truly excellent, it’s not necessarily a sign that Marvel has figured out how to get things back on track.

Though Brand New Day’s current box office is undeniably impressive, it’s not exactly surprising when you take a beat to remember how consistently well Sony and Marvel’s recent live-action Spider-Man projects have performed in the past. Both Spider-Man: Homecoming and No Way Home cleared the $100 million mark during their opening weekends, and it only took Far From Home six days to pull in $185 million. What’s different here is how quickly Brand New Day has shattered records and cemented itself as one of Marvel and Sony’s most fruitful collaborations. 

The film’s a testament to the fact that people do still have an appetite for big-screen comic book spectacle when the stars align just right. But the things that make this latest Spider-Man project work so well haven’t been present in the Sony-free parts of Marvel’s interconnected universe.

Editor’s note: This post contains Spider-Man: Brand New Day spoilers.

Even though Jon Watts’ Spider-Man trilogy eventually started mucking around in the multiverse, those films told relatively self-contained stories that were focused on building a grounded world around Tom Holland’s Peter Parker. Taking that approach highlighted the character’s evolution as a solo hero and made it interesting whenever he got roped into situations with the Avengers. 

Brand New Day feels like director Destin Daniel Cretton and cowriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers striking a strong balance between Sony’s solo Spider-Man movies and Marvel’s larger crossover events. There are a handful of classic Spider-Man rogues in the mix, like John Bernthal’s Punisher and Michael Mando’s Scorpion, who get their fair share of bombastic action sequences. Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk is running around too, but Brand New Day’s story is really about Peter dealing with the emotional consequences of erasing himself from the world’s memory.

As ridiculous as that all might sound (especially to non-comics fans), they’re details that Sony and Marvel’s previous Spider-Man collaborations laid the groundwork for. You could watch Watts’ trilogy and go into Brand New Day mostly understanding what’s at stake and how characters got to where they are emotionally. The MCU has struggled to maintain that kind of narrative cohesion during its sprawling Multiverse Saga, which began with WandaVision and will end with Avengers: Secret Wars. Marvel has been trying to keep far more plates spinning with its shared universe of films and series compared to Sony, which just pumped the brakes on making Spider-Man spinoff movies. But the mixed reactions to trailers for the studio’s next big feature makes it seem like people might not exactly be excited about what’s coming next.

Avengers: Doomsday will bring most of Marvel’s heroes together once again to fight a version of Doctor Doom portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. The movie will probably use the multiverse to explain why Doctor Doom looks exactly like Iron Man, and it will definitely bring a handful of the live-action 20th Century Studios X-Men to the MCU. Marvel is clearly using Doomsday and next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars to put a period on the Multiverse Saga and start fresh after years of the franchise being too unwieldy. 

The films and Downey Jr.’s rehiring are also Marvel’s way of moving on from the Kang-filled future Marvel gave up on after jettisoning Jonathan Majors. Kevin Feige has been open about new iterations of the X-Men being key to Marvel’s plans for the future. But if the studio wants audiences to really become invested in Charles Xavier and his students, it would do well to lean into some of Brand New Day’s strongest beats.

Rather than introducing Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey as a charming telepath, Brand New Day presents the character as a teenager willing to destroy anyone who gets in her way as she searches for her sister. Both of the Greys are mutants with natural abilities that make them dangerous, but what pushes Jean to deadly violence is the way the government is hunting them down in hopes of weaponizing them. By framing Jean as one of its villains, Brand New Day both keeps its story relatively grounded and gives you a way of understanding how the MCU is touching on classic elements of X-Men comics lore. Jean might not want to hurt innocent people, but she does in a very public way, and it’s easy to imagine her actions becoming the basis for human-mutant tensions going forward.

Brand New Day’s ability to tap into those ideas without feeling like a stealth X-Men movie is one of the more impressive things about it. And now that Spider-Man has given us a promising taste of the MCU’s new mutants, Marvel has a chance to keep audiences hooked if it doesn’t drop the ball like Fox.