By Wilkine Brutus / WLRN News
The way people discover content, like music and art, is changing fast.
AI-powered recommendation algorithms are creating fragmented social media feeds, carving pop culture into tiny, personalized bubbles, fueling echo chambers, and leaving fewer shared cultural experiences.
This fragmented digital landscape is being rapidly flooded with AI-generated art that often lack clear guardrails, creating real challenges for human artists and raising fears over of market oversaturation.
Delray Beach native Willonius Hatcher [pictured above] is considered a leader in AI-generated art; millions of people have shared his AI-generated songs. His recreations like the song “Move B*tch”, a classic Hip Hop joint by rapper Ludacris, have gone viral on many occasions — widely understood as humorous AI content.
But even Hatcher fears an over saturation of both good and bad AI-generated art flooding the already fragmented social media feeds.
“I think that because AI is gonna get so good to the point where like a 5-year-old can make something that looks like a masterpiece,” Hatcher told WLRN. “I think the human experience is gonna become a premium.”
Hatcher, better known as King Willonius, is an award‑winning comedian and filmmaker turned AI storyteller, whose viral track “BBL Drizzy” made him one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in AI.But what worries him even more isn’t just the flood of AI content.
Hatcher said meaningful regulation is difficult to execute because the U.S. is locked in a global AI race, a commercial and geopolitical technology battle typically between the U.S. and China.
As a result, he said, the rapid pace of adoption isn’t giving artists and people time to adapt.
“Regulation’s going to be difficult on that mass scale as it pertains to companies taking [protecting] artists’ likeness or individuals likeness, Hatcher said. “There has to be more mechanisms that just show this is an AI generated thing.”
He said an AI disclaimer across social media would be necessary but he doesn’t know what that would look like on a broad scale.
And while many see AI as democratizing art and a production tool that can enhance human made creations, it comes with some major, unregulated drawbacks.
“AI slop”— a term describing fake images, repetitive videos, and nonsense text — often clutters people’s feeds. And AI-manipulated videos, including deepfakes, increasingly blur the line between what’s real and what’s not.
Alex Wolf, a tech philosopher, entrepreneur, and content creator who travels between Miami and New York, said she’s confused about why “technologies are integrated in such an open-ended way” and “tampering with the basic public’s understanding of reality.”
Wolf [pictured here] said constantly changing algorithms now dictate how she makes edutainment and tech-philosophy content because social media platforms often favor quick bites over deep, contextualized content.
She said the social media platform’s incentive is money-driven — in this AI race, profit comes first, not meaningful culture and community.
“They’re in the business of selling advertisements, which is all about just splashing things in front of your eyeballs,” Wolf said. “So it’s not about creating media rich experiences, it’s about creating bits of impulse, emotional, quick reactions.”
Meanwhile, social media platforms such as Facebook are pushing hard to help creators earn money, since a strong creator ecosystem keeps users engaged and drives ad revenue. Even YouTube’s CEO Neal Mohan said his platform’s ad model ensures that “the more revenue we generate through ads, the more our creators generate.”
But that engagement plays out in an increasingly fragmented online community, where shared cultural experiences shrink and real human talent risks being crowded out.
Mark Finlayson [pictured here], an AI expert and computer science professor at Florida International University, said, unfortunately, users will see more “noise in the system.”
“It’s gonna become really hard to find authentic content or human generated content in your genre of interest no matter how niche it may be” Finlayson warned.
As AI reshapes creativity and community, artists are trying to hold on to what makes their work distinctly human. But there’s hope, he said.
Finlayson, whose research focuses on the Science of Narrative from a computational perspective, said that even in the noise, “the highest forms of artistic expression” will survive but they’ll demand more effort from audiences.
“I think we’re still gonna have that higher end of artistic expression and accomplishment,” he added. “It’s just gonna become somewhat rare. It’s gonna require more attention and training to kind of appreciate.”
Wilkine Brutus is a writer for WLRN News, South Florida’s only public radio station. This story was originally published by WLRN News.org, a content partner with Refresh Miami.
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