Signposts

Tonight I read that Spotify removed 75 million AI-generated songs from its streaming platform. Most of the focus was on eliminating fraud — songs that had been ripped off from legit artists and slightly modified to be posted as new tracks to get streams. What struck me though wasn’t the intent, it was the sheer volume and scale of it.

I sat there and imagined the same scale applied across all of the music streaming platforms, and then onto books, writing, art and other creative fields. The amount of content has reached the point where it seems ridiculously impossible to parse and discover quality, worth, and real individual human voices. 75 million tracks, generated in just a few months’ time.

With this endless well of churned-out content overflowing into a world limited by a fixed amount of attention available to witness it, it seems the most valuable thing we have left is our ability to leave human-shaped signposts among the places we walk. Messages from our lives, in our own handwriting, that serve as evidence that a someone walked this way. A trail that, if any stumble upon it in the wilderness of noise and fury and follow it even for a few moments, will tell a real story.

Maybe each of these stories speaks to and moves hundreds, thousands, or even millions. More probable that they speak to a few, or only one. That’s not the important part. What matters is that the stories exist. That our way-marks are thrust into the ground, or spray-painted along a crumbling brick wall, in a decrepit back alley of a blazing, monstrous neon city, that read:

I was here.