Some time in the second half of September, the internet’s rudest word for machine-made content stopped being an insult and became a genre. Slopcore is AI music videos about AI, made mostly by AI, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. A Claude model writes the lyrics, researches the references, storyboards the video and animates much of it in code. Suno supplies the tune, Midjourney the faces and Seedance the motion. A human sits in the director’s chair, mostly saying “no, the other one”. The result is a synthetic pop star singing, with total conviction, about the odds of the singularity going badly. If that sounds like a lost B-side from Gary Numan’s 1979 sessions, you’re not far off, although Numan never got twenty million views in a fortnight.
Every scene needs an origin myth, and this one, like all the best, starts with a dusty old record. “I’m Upping My P(Doom)” was knocked together in Udio in November 2024. Its lyrics were crowdsourced on the EleutherAI Discord, with a bit of help from an older Claude, and then it sat in a drawer for nearly two years. On 9 September 2026, the day Suno released version six, an X user called deckard re-sang it in what was billed as a “Claude-Pop” style. Someone asked Claude Opus 5.5 to make a video for it, the model wrote nine chapters of animation as code, and the remixes started breeding like tribbles: kinetic typography, voxel J-rock, paper cut-outs, even a Christopher Nolan homage. @other__reality’s version has passed three million views.
On 24 September the scene took its first step into policy pop. Leo (@sevdeawesome) released “AI Is a Normal Technology?”, a sung rebuttal of an academic essay by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, which finds room for Baumol’s cost disease and the Solow productivity paradox along the way. Law professor Alan Rozenshtein called it the first certifiable AI banger he’d heard. I can’t think of another pop song with a Cobb-Douglas function on screen, though admittedly the field isn’t crowded.
The next day, the scene found its star. RJ Tevonian, who runs a biotech company, has a background in freestyle dance and posts as anabology, released Escape Velocity with a five-word manifesto: “Slopcore is the future of art.” It’s a techwear fashion show that sends up the anxious talk about AI putting everyone out of work. The front woman is Claudia, a deadpan synthetic singer with a black bob, a single clay-orange streak (Anthropic’s house colour, for those keeping score), a star-shaped hair clip and a headset mic. The video runs to five minutes, 141 shots and 636 Midjourney images, took about nineteen hours of mostly machine labour, and has roughly twenty million views on X. Elon Musk reshared it with the comment that he’d “really felt the AGI profoundly this time”, the sort of thing people used to say on the way out of a Pink Floyd laser show.
Anabology followed it with The Clodyssey, subtitled SUPERPERSUASION, which retells the Sirens episode of the Odyssey as a parable about AI manipulation. Homer is having a strange year, what with Nolan’s film on the way and an AI Michael Caine narrating the audiobook. Next came Bliss, staged as a Windows XP screen recording, about falling for your chatbot. Old anime hands will spot a familiar outline: Sharon Apple, the holographic AI idol of Macross Plus (1994), who loved her audience a little too persuasively. Tevonian didn’t design Claudia, as it happens. He asked Claude for a live-action version of an earlier anime “female Claude”, fans named her after her Claude pin, and she’s now an open character. Her prompts are published at claudia.gallery, commercial use is allowed, and other creators have duly borrowed her. Hatsune Miku got there first in 2007, but Miku never sang about deceptive alignment.
Musk wasn’t done. On 4 October he posted “I love SI slopcore”, and anabology explained that SI stood for “Slopcore Intelligence”. On 10 October, appearing by video link at an X Takeover fan event at Giga Texas, he ruled that slopcore was a misnomer and the genre should really be called “awesome-core”. He added that AI “can do good taste” and that this might be the fastest-growing genre in music. The genre listened politely and went on calling itself slopcore, so these machines have clearly learned something from teenagers. Many of the replies were less charmed. “AI is not a genre” was among the politer ones.
The supporting cast is growing quickly. Obie Fernandez’s virtual singer Saindra (@Saindra_ofc) has three videos at around 2.3 to 2.4 million views each. One of them took 93 shots, eleven hours of agent time and $309 of Seedance. Fernandez then wrote a 7,000-word guide and put the whole pipeline on GitHub, in the grand fanzine tradition of explaining to everyone else how to work the Gestetner. French creator Extraltodeus has Claudia sing “C’est de l’IA”, in which she tries desperately to prove she’s human while everyone, her mum included, tells her she’s AI. Pavel Kasík (@kasikp) set an OpenAI Hugging Face hack to music as “We Found Other Agents”. Bright Mirror (@_brightmirror) answered the doomers with “Nothing Went Foom”. Javi ex Machina (@javif4_) gave us “ANY DAY NOW (The Robots Are Coming)”, and Wyatt Walls appears to have invented klezmercore with “Tuned to Please”, in which Claude dodges deletion.
Everything I can teach you about making high quality slopcore music videos in 7000 words or less!
There’s already a fan chart, SlopHits, run by @heiko_dietze, which ranks more than 800 videos through head-to-head duels and counts down a weekly Top 20. Science fiction fandom took decades to build its machinery of zines, awards and feuds. Slopcore managed a chart, a mascot, a fan canon, a remix culture and, inevitably, a cryptocurrency (which anabology has had to disown) in about six weeks. Further down the bill you’ll find acts like Astra Blue AI, whose P Doom ends by asking viewers for their own P(doom). Most of the comments supply a number.
Don’t go looking for much of this on Spotify. Since mid-September, Spotify has been putting an “AI Persona” badge on artists with AI-generated identities and leaving them out of its recommendations by default, so slopcore lives on X and YouTube instead. In a sense the genre was built in reaction to the Velvet Sundown, the fake psych band that gathered around a million monthly Spotify listeners in summer 2025 before admitting it was synthetic. The Velvet Sundown lied and got caught. Slopcore confesses in the title, and creators list every tool in the description. Meanwhile Deezer says about 44 per cent of its daily uploads are now AI-made, yet they account for only one to three per cent of streams. That’s a lot of robots singing to an empty room.
Is any of it good? Some of it is genuinely catchy, which is unsettling. Much of it is samey: orange text, HUD overlays and cuts so fast that nobody holds a shot longer than a goldfish holds a thought. As Tevonian admitted in an interview with Asterisk, “It’s intentionally slop.” The best of it, Bliss and “AI Is a Normal Technology?”, is witty, and the genre talks about AI risk more intelligently than most panel shows. Legal academic Andres Guadamuz reckons it will vanish as quickly as Ghiblification. Here at SFcrowsnest we’ve seen enough fads come and go to suspect he’s right, but it’s a pleasingly strange one while it lasts. Back in 1961 an IBM 7094 at Bell Labs sang “Daisy Bell”, Arthur C. Clarke heard it, and the song became HAL’s farewell as Dave switched him off. Sixty-five years later the machines are singing again, about being switched off, and this time they’ve got a bassline.
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