Is being human the new punk rock?

In this era of AI slope, brain rot and automation, hope in humanity is the true rebellion.

The new Superman movie gives a new meaning to punk rock and I’m all for it. Superman (2025)

The other day I turned to Netflix in search for something that made me forget my uterus was being slowly but unmercifully strangled. Nothing out of the ordinary, just period cramps.

Because I was in a particular mood and affected by mild pain, I needed something that didn’t required a lot of attention on my side given I had neither the focus nor the energy, but which also wasn’t too underwhelming because then I would get bored after five minutes and my attention would shift back to my contracting uterus. In short: I needed something that was distracting but not demanding.

It shouldn’t be hard to find in Netflix, which has earned a reputation for producing casual viewing content you can play in the background while going about doing the dishes.

After a few minutes I settled for Back in Action, a Netflix film starring Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx as the leads, two actors I like and are good suited for both action and comedy. The blurb promised family-friendly action comedy which sounded about right up my take-my-mind-off-my-period-cramps-but-don’t-ask-me-to-be-invested street.

Except that once I started watching -and despite some cliched dialogue that made me wince- I realised I had made a mistake for this wasn’t the kind of background film I was looking for. Definitely not when you have Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Jamie Demetriou and Kyle Chandler, a great cast with solid acting chops on their backs any way you look at it.

Without spoiling anything, I’d just say that while the story would have benefitted from a faster-paced rhythm and more thrilling action sequences considering the lead characters are highly-trained former spies, it’s not a bad movie and I wanted to read what others had to say about it.

The online reviews were less positive and I came across a couple which described the movie as something you play on the background while doing the dishes. While I understand where it comes from, after all I set out to watch something on the housekeeping category, Back in Action is not it. This may not be a movie that will change anyone’s life, but it’s not so terrible it can’t raise above being background noise while you scrub away dinner leftovers.

Besides, you don’t have Glenn Close on the background while doing the dishes. I am not an animal, for Christ’s sake, and I have lots of respect for a woman who was pushed by Michael Douglas to the brink and then accused of being the guilty part. No one is putting Glenn Close on the background, not on my watch at least.

So the question that started to form in my head was why a movie with a great cast and not a bad premise (although not electrifying) had ended up straight on a streaming platform and relegated by some as worthy of inhabiting the casual viewing category?

The answer may be generational.

Back in Action is not a background noise movie, it’s just an ok movie, the kind that back in the 90s or early 00s this is the kind of film that would have been released to cinemas and drove families to it. It would have probably ended up becoming an enjoyable family classic, the one you may not look for specifically but which you watch everytime it’s on tv.

But we are not in the 90s or early 00s and ok original movies hardly deserve a threatrical release when there is a new superhero franchise or remake knocking at the door and likely to attract millions with its thrilling CGI powered action scenes which make up 90% of its plot and which keep our adrenaline and dopamine levels balanced.

Because in an era dominated by social media, streaming and the subscription economy, our consolidated adiction to bigger, better and newer demands a fresh batch of high-octane series and films released every week to compete for our very frazzled attention spans in the hope to drive a surge in subscriptions and keep the attention economy wheels turning without a halt. And obviously you can’t sustain that volume of content to keep the money rolling without compromising on quality, which paves the way for the AI slope galore and underwhelming cultural output we have ended up in. Not to speak of our inability to be able to sit still or enjoy something that progresses at a slower pace or, god forbid, includes more than two minutes of dialogue.

Back to Action is an ok movie, the one that not so long ago movie stars sooner or lated ended up in because while not career-defining, it still brings work and money to the table and audiences, while not flocking to buy a ticket for a rewatch, will not hate it either. The spitting definiting of an ok movie. But in a time where we there is so much going on, an ok, even a decent movie, will just not cut it anymore and it’d be relegated to the casual viewing drawer of your streaming platform of choice without much thought. Especially when you have the power to pause it anytime for a toilet break while you do the dishes.

Back in Action

The use of the expression casual viewing/listening/reading today has become a passe-partout that betrays more our inability to pay attention than the artistic quality of the content we are choosing to ignore, which opens the door for AI slop, but also low-quality content, to infiltrate every aspect of our cultural output.

Which leads me to the other reason why this expression is problematic: because we are no longer bound to go to the cinema for a film, or buy a record or go to concert to listen to our favourity band as technology has brought them to us, we have come to accept, and to some degree expect, the existence of specific mindless content created with the sole purpose to act as background noise while we scroll our social media or focus on other tasks. Nothing can keep us engaged anymore for more than ten minutes. Perhaps we are the ones to blame for the slop avalanche, whether human or AI-generated, that we are experiencing if we have so easily let go of our willingness to be present and pay attention.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not immune to distraction myself.

In fact, I did a Hugh Grant and dozed off when I went to see the new Superman last week, missing key parts of the plot, so I had to go back and watch it again -twice again to be precise. An act that has been rewarded with a movie that made sense once I didn’t sleep through some key scenes, an uplifting message on how we always have a choice in life to act differently, and how being human requires great courage not everyone is capable of as it requires kindness and trusting people are good in a world where global events have made it very hard to believe so. Hope in humanity, he tells an incredulous Lois and us, it’s the new punk rock.

The second time I went to see the film, however, I was distracted by the number of people -most of them in their late teens to mid 20s- with their phones on during the screening to the point it was distracting. Hence my third go, which was finally as it should be: sleep and phone free.

Falling asleep at the cinema has been happening for years and it’s almost part of the experience. Checking our phones to be entertained while having paid to watch a movie to be entertained, or using our phone to record a concert we have waited years to see, should not be.

Pre-internet, when we didn’t have the possibility to enjoy something immediately anytime we wanted, we paid attention. Scarcity made us focused. We absorbed more, we remembered the lyrics of a song, the name of the characters of a book, the dialogue of a film and where we were when we first experienced them because we didn’t have to shift our attention constantly to something new. Before the arrival of smart phones the right here, right now was happening in the physical world as we experienced it, not through a screen in the palm of our hands.

That doesn’t mean we never put books down, paused a film or played The Beatles on the background while cleaning the house. Or that everything that was made was a masterpiece. Cultural nostalgia has a tendency to present the past as a place were everything was more elevated than it was (think Shakespeare’s language or Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which was originally created for popular audiences) but bad films, bad music, and bad books were part of our upbringing in the years preceeding the arrival of the attention economy as much as they are now. The difference is that there were few of them because there was few of everything in general.

Unlike today’s casual readers/listeners/viewers who are bombarded with incessant content to keep the subscription economy going, we had fewer opportunities to see a film, buy a record, or order a book so it’d better be worth it. Perhaps that made of us more discerning audiences as we had both less things to focus on and fewer opportunities to do so. We wanted to be entertained but would protest if we realised we were being pushed to like something that was a total rip-off and devoid of any quality because we

In the era of streaming the sense of urgency has been lost. Everything is always available, in one platform or another, and provided you are willing to pay, distractions won’t be lacking, one after another, 24/7. Little does it matter if a film, a show, a record, or a book is not up to our standards because in the blink of an eye it will have been replaced by something probably better that we are encouraged to pay our undivided attention for the next 15 seconds. Brain rot was the Oxford dictionary word of the year in 2024 for a reason.

Which leads me to whether we may be directly responsible for the surge of casual content, whether AI-generated or human-made, whose sole purpose of existing is to be enjoyed in the background of our lives. Although maybe this is a chicken and egg situation and it may be not possible to identify which came first, the overwhelming offer with underwhelming substance that streaming platforms, social media and the subscriber economy have pushed our way or the casual cultural consumer that will gladly feed on anything as long as it offers a distraction from their own life.

Synthetic content - produced by AI or a machine learning system- will no longer be distinguisable from that produced by humans in a few years’ time. Future generations will most likely see no reason to differentiate between the two because to them it would be an already established medium and it may not challenge as much the notions they have about the importance of preserving human-made culture. At least that is what everyone working in this field tells me when we catch up.

The extent to which AI will be permeating more and more of our cultural landscape can be found in The Velvet Sundown, the latest Spotify sensation with 1 million streams. Hope you aren’t looking forward to going to any of their concerts because they’re an AI-generated group and so is their music. Don’t worry too much if you didn’t notice. Maybe you were only casually listening to them while going about your business in the house and therefore it was an easy one to miss. If you did liked them, I hope you don’t feel cheated by the discovery they don’t exist. Between The Salt Path scandal and The Velvet Sundown this is a terrible month for trusting souls.

And here I need to make a digression to say something about The Salt Path because while this specific book is of no interest to me as a reader, the controversy it has caused is no different from finding out that a content that you thought genuine turns out to be AI-generated and therefore you feel doubly betrayed because now you not only question whether what it has made you feel but also the fact that those feelings are the product of something that isn’t anchored in reality and has been artificially created to provoke a certain reaction, which falls in the realms of manipulation. And while we could argue that all art, in a way, manipulates its intended audience to provoke a certain emotion in them, it should do so from a place of creative authenticity not deception.

You could argue streaming platforms such as Spotify and record labels are to blame for the rise of easy listening playlists and you’d be 99.99% right because they all want to get rich and so whether the music is made by an AI band or a human they’d get their share all the same -which is almost net profit if a human hasn’t been involved.

But why is music made in first place? Who listens to it? Who needs it so desperately in their lives for someone to spot an opportunity to profit from generating music by fake artists?

It’s us, the people.

When I was a teenager, there was a Spanish radio station which slogan was “It’d be terrible to live without music.” They had created an ad campaign both on tv and radio and had put music to it to prove the point. The song they had picked was Wonderwall and I remembered being completly transfixed the first time I listed to the ad, which was the first time I ever listed to Wonderwall. It was only 15 seconds but I was changed. Wonderwall would play several times a day on the radio at the time and I would turn up the volume as if it was the last time I could listen to it. In a way it was because I couldn’t predict when I’d be listening to next. No one I knew liked Oasis, I didn’t know myself who they were, only that they played this song which was on the radio often. At a time when Spotify hadn’t yet enter anyone’s vocabulary, this made every listening a concentrated effort to absorb every word, every change in the melody, in case it’d be the last one. The exact opposite of casual listening where you can’t tell a playlist from another.

So let’s go back to my original question: which came first, the casual cultural consumer or the abundance of low-quality and AI-generated content avalanche?

If we as humans feel the need to listen to music or watch a film, even on the background, why should we expect no one to capitalise on that at the cost of our capacity to engage with genuine, transformative, human-made content that can help expand our taste and cultural horizons? Instead, we have companies jumping on the casual bandwagon that fills their pockets as we put on yet another AI-generated track to satisfy our craving for background noise while we vacuum. The irony is not lost on me.

But when an audience demands new distractions and you can produce them by the dozen at almost no cost thanks to AI, everything is an opportunity to make a few extra pounds on the side. Thankfully some people do pay attention and have spotted Spotify had gone as far as creating AI-generated tracks from deceased artists.

The rise of AI content is not a result of a lack of talent or the mark of the cultural decline of our era. Quite the contrary. If anything, there is a lack of opportunity for talent to break through across any creative discipline as traditional systems have collapsed and given way to a more DIY approach when it comes to discoverability.

There are many great artists making music today but not all of them get the opportunity to play a live gig in a Glasgow pub invited by another band they’re friends with, and end up the night signing a record deal because a leading music executive just happens to be there by chance to annoy his ex-girlfriend, who plays on the band who invited you to the gig. Which is how Oasis came into being who they are, by the way.

Nowadays an artist has far better chances to become known to the public by making a Tiktok song people can use for a viral trend over and over. Or if they’re already a recording artist, pray that in their next gig there is for a moment rivalling the Astronomer CEO scandal at the Coldplay concert.

Leaving virality aside, the traditional musical cycle has been disrupted by the arrival of streaming platforms, which changed the way we listen to music and discover new artists. It’s not necessarily a bad thing -I would have never found out about many artists that I’ve come to love had it not been for Spotify-, but it has come at a great cost for artists, which now rely on bigger numbers to make a living. And when the offer is so overwhelming, the chances of being found diminish.

While it can be argued that the channels for self-promotion have become more democratic and accessible and it is no longer imperative to have a large label behind to reach an audience, the reality is that an increasingly fragmented market where two people of the same age and living in the same place no longer listen to the same music as there is not such thing as mainstream tv or radio stations that introduce new artists and help them create a fanbase, leaves a lot in the hands of the algorithm.

The best shot you have at discovering a new act organically these days is to live in a city with a good music scene where you can go to venues or festivals. Trusting the algorithm has become a leap of faith and you may end up vibing to The Velvet Sundown and wondering when they’ll play in London next.

It seems it is also harder these days for artists to transcend their generational outreach, which makes them compete for a very saturated audience that relies on social media to find new music. However, the pace at which an act needs to secure a devoted audience quickly these days to sustain their musical ambitions is brutal. By the time you discover a new band you like, they may have already broken up. I can’t imagine any emerging artist in the past 10 years having the future impact The Beatles had on generations of people who came to their music as a rite of passage when hitting adolescence long after the group dissolved. But what can you expect when GenZ thinks Artic Monkeys are dad music. Appalling.

Reading is not immune to the AI slop avalanche we are drowning in.

In fact, the need to satisfy our endless cultural cravings at a pace no human can keep up with paved the way for the Chicago Tribune fiasco, where the newspaper confessed AI had been used to put together a summer reading list that produced some interesting AI hallucinated titles its authors would be very keen to hear more about. Maybe they set out to actually write them.

Which begs once again the question of whether we have become excessively reliant on AI to outsource our cultural discoveries for us and subtly dictate our taste by reducing our worldview to what generates engagement and, by extension, profit. It is no longer a matter of quality but of quantity. More (quantity) is more (eyeballs) in the age of content monetisation.

Similarly to music, technology has disrupted both what being a writer is in an age when your words can be scrapped online and repurposed without giving you any credit It has also changed, and to an extent slightly democratised, the publishing game and how books can be made more accessible with the rise of audiobooks, which means they can now can also be narrated by AI, sorry.

Never before was so easy for aspiring and established writers alike to have direct access to a potential audience without the need of intermediaries, if we ignore the algorithm that puts a few people very insistently under your radar while hiding many others.

Unfortunately Substack is no stranger to AI slop invading the platform. As the company is slowly but surely becoming for writers the equivalent of what Youtube has become for musicians and podcasters in terms of discoverability, the question is how many people have the actual capacity to produce engaging pieces regularly that make someone a paying subscriber unless that is already their main job. It is no wonder the casual writer may be tempted to resort to AI-generated content to give their publication, and subscribers’ count, a boost.

The problem with this is that Substack is incentivised to allow this content to flow freely -in the same way it does with other problematic content on claims of free speech- provided it drives engagement and attracts readers to the platform, especially considering their founders’ ambitious plans following a new round of investment. Because like Spotify, Substack is a tech platform that needs to generate profit to keep existing so it depends on engagement to drive paying subscriptions regardless of whether there is a human behind the content being pushed out.

Now that concerns have been raised about the AI slop permeatting the platform, how many people are willing to commit their attention and money to publications if they suspected them to be powered by AI, even occasionally? Before we know it we can have another Salt Path gate at our front door. Imagine the scenario: Someone claims what they wrote was real but it turns out it was all the product of ChatGPT and now people are furious and want their money back. Meanwhile, Gillian Anderson regrets having said yes to acting in the original film adaptation inspired by that viral piece when the sequel on the scandal promises to be way juicier.

Perhaps both Substack and Spotify should take a leaf out of Youtube, which is updating its policies to demonetise any AI-generated content, which would have significant impact on the reduction of AI slop and low-quality output intended only to keep us distracted from engaging with more meaningful, human-made pieces that, while imperfect, have a long lasting impact on us.

Netflix would do well by following the example set by Apple TV and its focus on quality over quantity, especially after it has emerged they are using AI for a few of their shows, which perhaps isn’t so surprising considering they advertised a job for an AI product manager amid the Hollywood strikes or that Netflix Chairman sits on the board of Anthropic.

Perpahs this is why Apple TV shows have received a record-breaking number of Emmy nominations this year: less (quantity) allows you to focus on more (quality).

Take for instance the The Studio, the most nominated freshman comedy series with 23 nominations, including best comedy, which casts a satirical look at the world of Hollywood and the harsh truths of film production in the era of streaming.

A constant in the show is how cinema lover Matt Remick (played by Seth Rogen) finds himself in his dream job as Head of Studio only to realise he is now forced to kill the movies he dreamed of making in order to churn out movies that are profitable and keep business afloat.

In one of the subplots, while the protagonists are worried about whether a new movie based on Kool-Aid (a not so subtle critique about the money-grabbing screen adaptations of late) could be perceived as racist based on the cast, Remick ends up getting backlash for the use of AI to cut costs on visual effects and animation, which gets leaked as he is presenting the movie at an event and creates a chain-reaction that jeopardises the future of the film as people have very strong opinions about AI.

It is not lost on me that I’m using as an example a show that, however good it is, requires people to be subscribed to a specific platform in order to view it and be part of the conversation, which is testament to how fragmented the cultural offer it is in the age of streaming. Such is I’m afraid the world we live in and I doubt we can chage that at this stage.

However not everything is lost. Not yet at least.

We do have agency even when the odds seem against us at a time when people resort to TikTok for a quick music fix, to streaming to avoid silence while cleaning the house, to their phones to avoid the commitment of watching a full film whether at home or at the cinema, and to ChatGPT for their writing, and most worryingly their thinking as OpenAI has shared that ChatGPT receives 2.5 billion prompts from global users every day.

We can tip the scale in our favour by choosing to be mindful about the culture we engage with and how. As obvious as it may seem, less proves to be always more.

We can give something human-made our undivided attention and recognition, whether a book, a song, a film, a painting, a photograph, a piece of advice from a good friend, or a recipe passed on from our grandmother.

We have the power to refuse anything specifically created to insult our intelligence and our capacity to engage critically with the world around us.

We have the ability discern between when were are being treated as humans with emotions and taste by other humans sharing their art with us, and when we are seen as eyeballs with an attention span deficit and wallets for companies to exploit for profit.

We have, in short, the power to reclaim and demand a better culture for humans by humans and better ways to support those who want to contribute to create something that inspires future generations to also create their own music, make their own films or write their own stories for others to enjoy and be inspired in return.

Technology can contribute to democratise how we access new voices and talent whether in filmmaking (thanks to streaming platforms producing more content beyond traditional studios and broadcast tv), in writing (Substack is a good example), or in music (Youtube or Spotify can amplify the outreach of emerging musicians) but we should not accept that the culture we are exposed to, and which plays a fundamental role in shaping our taste, is outsourced to technology, which doesn’t need to pay a human to generate distractions.

For if we let AI decide which music, films and books we read and accept everything it pushes our way, in a few years’ time we may no longer have any human-made music, films or books to enjoy. We may even lose our capacity to appreciate human-made art that hasn’t been generated with a precise formula we have become addicted to.

To paraphrase a quote, and main theme, from the new Superman movie, maybe the real punk rock in this era where it seems the way forward for culture is to suffocate in the heaps of AI slop thrown at us is to be radically, authentically human in every way we can and not be afraid to show it through the choices we make every day. Culturally and beyond.

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Abroad is independent publication about London, living in between cultures, languages, books, music, films, creativity, and being human in the age of artificial intelligence.

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