last updated April 26, 2026Comments? Send email to: fny@freenewyork.net
Episode #1052: I'm A.I. and I'm Here to Say...
First Broadcast: 4/27/26
It wasn't that long ago--barely seven months ago!--when we here at Free New York bemoaned the concept of A.I.-generated podcasts clogging up the Internet. Now, the music streaming service "Deezer" reports that 44% of all the material uploaded to its site is A.I.-generated music, which "amounts to more than 2 Million AI-generated tracks uploaded per month," or over 24 million A.I.-generated tracks per year. That's bad enough, but in 2025 the Spotify service reported receiving over 75 million A.I.-generated "spammy" tracks in 12 months, which would mean 3 spam tracks submitted for every 4 genuine tracks in their catalog, and the fraud doesn't stop there, with one company estimating as much as "5% to 10% of all streams across the industry" being fraudulent. It feels like a bizarre echo of Mr. B The Gentleman Rhymer's song, "Army of Robots" ("I'm going to employ an army of robots / To endlessly play / My stuff on Spotify"), only now the robots are generating the songs as well as streaming them! Creating music as a form of artistic expression and listening to music as a form of recreation all seem to be beside the point! As we contemplated the colossal waste of time and energy this sad state of affairs represents, we also touched on an item that seems like an attempt to make the surveillance state more family-friendly, namely the "Connection Keeper" from Prego (the pasta sauce company), a device intended to be placed on your dinner table where it can record your family's conversations and upload them to the cloud, where they'll be preserved for eternity (or however long the cloud holds out). As you might have guessed, neither of us at Free New York thought this idea was very... appetizing (okay, I'll stop), no matter how good the intentions of Prego's partner in this, Story Corps, might have been. Does every part of our day really need to be recorded? Does every part of our existence need to be preserved in amber? Can't we have some room to be people without having to worry if every part of our existence will come back to haunt us? Pardon me if I cut this short--all this talking about pasta has made me hungry. Just remember to keep the glue out of your pizza!
So, what is Free New York anyway? The simple answer is that it's a
this neat little
public access TV show on
Manhattan Neighborhood Network which I co-produce with the
tremendous help of my camerawoman/editor/everything else,
Kim. The complicated answer
is that it's a project of mine to broadcast opinions and events which
don't always appear within "the mainstream media" (like The New York Times,
the major networks, local radio, etc.), and so far I think it's been working.
If you think I'm doing a good job--or not--and you feel
like sending me snail mail, the address is:
Free New York
P.O. Box 20945
Tompkins Square Station
New York, NY 10009
You can also email me at fny@freenewyork.net, which should get to me a lot faster than the snail mail.
last updated April 26, 2026
Comments?
Send email to: fny@freenewyork.net