I'm old enough to remember when musicians wanted to ban synths — is AI music just another anti-tech panic?

New York, London, Paris, Munich, everyone's talking 'bout slop music

18 Feb 2026, 01:00 · TechRadar

Opinion By Carrie Marshall published 18 February 2026

(Image credit: Suno)

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Stop me if you've heard this before: musicians are urging people not to embrace new technology because it's not real music and it'll put real musicians out of work. This time the year is 2026 and the technology is AI, but it's a song we've heard before. I remember hearing it back in 1982, when members of the UK Musicians' Union wanted to ban synthesizers and drum machines to protect working musicians' jobs.

There's a long tradition of musicians going "nooooooo!" about new technology in music. In the 1960s there were calls to ban the Mellotron, fearing it would replace session string players. In the 1970s and 1980s disco and dance music's use of synths and drum machines was derided. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Autotune was the enemy. And now many people are arguing against the use of generative AI.

AI boosters argue that this is history repeating, a reactionary backlash to new musical tools. But generative AI is very different from the tech that came before it.

Talkin' 'bout AI generation

Whether it's a synth, a sampler, Autotune or Ableton Live, tech can do great things in music. And you can say the same about AI. Many artists use AI-based mastering tools to make their songs sound better, and tools like AI stem separation and chord detection are incredible. But they're musical helpers, not music creators.

Fans of generative AI say that artists will use the tech as they did drum machines and digital audio workstations, using new tools to reach new creative heights. And I'm sure many artists will: platforms such as Mozart.ai, which bill themselves as musical co-producers rather than music generators, which create parts of songs rather than complete tracks and which promise that their system wasn't trained on stolen sounds, look very promising. But what worries me is that the music those musicians make won't be heard, and won't make them any money.

And that's because right now generative AI isn't really being used to help musicians. It's being used to drown them out.

Slop, slop, slop music

Streaming services are experiencing a plague of AI slop: waves of AI-generated songs designed to sound like popular artists and in some cases, actually pretending to be real artists. They're not so much songs as spam, and they can be generated in massive quantities with virtually zero effort. Slop can be created and uploaded far faster than any system can detect it and take it down, leading to the AI grey goo scenario where the volume of AI-generated content overwhelms everything.

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