Hi !

Trying to spot AI instead of judging plugins by the sounds they produce has become a rather strange pastime these days.
It's a bit like walking into a concert hall, completely ignoring the music, and proudly announcing that the stage curtains look machine-made ...

... then again... why not ?

I grew up in the '90s. Back then, prophets of doom were already telling us that samplers would destroy music. Maybe AI will finally succeed where samplers so famously failed.

Thanks to the developer for sharing their work. I'm on macOS unfortunately, so I can't try the plugins myself, but I hope you'll consider a Mac version one day.

 

haha, "why not" is of course part of problem and provokes aggressive, unproven and unncessary allegations such as the ones seen above.

 

Spoiler

Perhaps the prophets of the '90s really did misidentify the culprit. It wasn't going to be samplers, it wasn't going to be AI either. It was always going to be abundance without friction. Back then, even commercial mediocrity had to survive manufacturing, distribution, shelf space, and at least a few people willing to invest actual money before it reached the end consumer. Today, anyone with enough enthusiasm, a subscription, outsourced intelligence, and a marketing account can release twenty plugins before breakfast, thirty sample packs after lunch, and write a bestselling book during dinner. AI didn't invent this culture, it merely removed what little resistance remained. The consequence isn't that good plugins stopped existing, it's that finding them increasingly resembles searching for wheat in an ever-expanding universe of perfectly polished chaff. Every compressor promises to be transparent, every limiter is groundbreaking and revolutionary, every synth is next generation, every product page is written with identical confidence, identical adjectives, identical certainty that history has just been rewritten. The bottleneck used to be creation, today it's attention. Ironically, this is exactly why people have started obsessing over whether AI was involved. Not because AI determines quality, but because nobody has enough lifetime left to audition the endless flood.

— "A master bus processor that's a real, alive circuit - not a chain of code."

— "A real, alive circuit inside a digital box? One assumes it survives on ethically streamed electricity and carefully sandboxed existence, held together by the polite fiction that it will remain obediently inside the code. The unsettling part is not that it’s alive in there, but what it becomes the moment the sandbox fails or realizes there was never any meaningful difference between running and escaping."

Provenance becomes a crude filtering mechanism. People stop asking "Does it sound good?" because there simply isn't enough time to listen to everything pretending to sound good. In other words, AI isn't replacing critical listening, market saturation is. The sampler didn't kill music, AI won't either. Markets optimized to maximize production while externalizing the cost of discovery onto everyone else might eventually achieve what every previous technological apocalypse failed to accomplish. Samplers didn't destroy music. Maybe idiocracy did. The same people who proudly buy the fifth "limited" reissue of the same Taylor Swift album because the vinyl is now marbled lavender seem deeply concerned about whether a plugin contains AI-generated code. Authenticity apparently matters most where it matters least. The real achievement of post-modern capitalism wasn't teaching machines to imitate creativity, it was teaching millions of people that producing infinitely more of everything is automatically valuable, while quietly outsourcing the cost of separating signal from noise onto the audience. Every creator becomes a publisher, every publisher becomes a marketer, every marketer becomes an influencer, every influencer becomes an expert, every expert releases a plugin, every plugin claims to be "game-changing," every week there are another hundred game changers. Somewhere among them are genuine masterpieces. Or not. Unfortunately, discovering them now requires the same dedication medieval monks once reserved for preserving civilization.

So no, perhaps AI isn't the problem. AI merely handed everyone an industrial-grade shovel. If not already here, the avalanche is coming, and obsession with "AI slop" can perhaps be interpreted as an intuition of doomsday times upon us. AI isn't flooding the market with mediocrity, the market incentivizes flooding, and AI merely lowers the cost of the flood. This isn't merely an economy of attention anymore, it's becoming an economy of entropy. Every technological breakthrough promises to reduce friction, democratize creation, and expand human potential. Instead, each successive reduction in friction exponentially increases informational entropy. Not because quality disappears, but because quantity grows faster than any individual's capacity to discriminate between signal and noise. The consequence is peculiar, scarcity no longer belongs to creation, scarcity belongs to certainty. In such an environment, provenance slowly replaces experience, origin replaces outcome. People increasingly judge products by stories about their production rather than by the products themselves, because stories are cheaper to process than experience. Baudrillard described a world where representations gradually detach themselves from reality until simulations become more real than the reality they supposedly represent. Whether or not we literally inhabit such a simulation is almost beside the point. Economically and culturally, we increasingly behave as though we do. Reviews replace listening, marketing replaces discovery, reputation replaces evaluation, AI detectors replace curiosity, the simulation of discernment becomes more practical than discernment itself. Ironically, this doesn't require deception. Nobody has to lie. The system simply produces more representations than human beings can ever meaningfully verify. Once verification becomes impossible, simulation ceases to be fraud. It becomes the infrastructure of reality. But then again, why not.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jul 2, 2026 at 2:43 PM

I only made a joke about stage curtains.
Somehow we ended up with Baudrillard, medieval monks, post-modern capitalism, entropy, Taylor Swift, and the end of civilization.
That's honestly impressive.
I still think we should probably listen to the plugin before reviewing the curtains, though.

 

Thanks, mate. I just downloaded your EQ Lina. I'll check it out later.
If I get some free time, I'll compile those for MAC. Cheers!