AI beats to study to
kill switch
Kaleidoscope
4.7 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lo-Fi beats once stood as the chill soundtrack of the internet, a cozy genre rooted in human touch and imperfections. But in recent years, AI-generated mixes have flooded platforms like YouTube, pumping out endless streams of eerily similar tracks that mimic the vibe, without the soul. What happens when the scene gets overtaken by AI? Dexter talks to Kieran Press-Reynolds, a writer at Pitchfork, about how AI is reshaping the genre, what that means for artists, and whether there is still room for the human touch in the age of AI-generated beats.
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Read + Watch:
Kieran’s article, “How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene”: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-ai-wreaked-havoc-on-the-lo-fi-beat-scene/
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| 0:45.0 | It would be like the same few loops over and over again, |
| 0:52.6 | and there was a real lack of dynamism to them. |
| 0:57.0 | But there was something kind of robotic about it. |
| 0:59.5 | Kieran Press Reynolds is a columnist for Pitchfork. |
| 1:02.6 | A while back, he wrote an article about how AI is taking over a specific genre of music, Lofi beats. |
| 1:09.4 | And these videos were like hours long, and they'd either have no song titles in the |
| 1:14.7 | description, which is a big red flag, or they would have time stamps with songs. |
| 1:20.3 | The titles that were just saying nothing, like they would all be sort of like just |
| 1:23.9 | seeming like generated nonsense. So there are all these kind of clues that this music, something fishy was going on. |
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