In the mid-2010s, when I was in high school, the genre known as lo-fi beats was like a brain cleanse for all my time spent mainlining Minecraft and YouTube. The music was tender, with drums sizzling like kitchen pans and trumpet that zigzagged over the soundscape’s open pasture. Perfectly timed samples leapt out like flickers of a memory. Only a few channels soared back then; the mixes all had whimsical titles and background visuals that simulated the feeling of sitting indoors, cocooned in a duvet, while rain lightly falls outside.

Fast-forward to now, and the scene has putrefied into a wasteland of the percussive undead. The YouTube search results have warped into an apparent AI breeding ground, crammed with hourlong mixes full of soporific dreck. The channels have similar names and cartoonish Kawaii imagery. Even the comments of the videos, which have millions of plays, brim with what look like fake conversations—pseudoymous accounts prattling on about how the music helped them unlock their true potential in life. Multiple channels repeat the same sentence structure like, “I don’t want much! I just want the person reading this to be healthy, happy, and loved!,” suggesting they’re AI-generated. “To whoever reads this comment: you are a wonderful person and I love you,” writes one channel called Coffee Time, which specializes in videos with titles that read more like Airbnb listings than music: “Happy Morning Jazz | Elegant Bossa Nova In Luxury Cliffside Cabin Overlooking the Sea for Relaxation.” It’s the theme song for the dead internet theory, a rave-yard of zombified AI agents chilling out to death.

Longtime heads who fell in love with lo-fi beats and delicately craft it themselves are starting to panic. Obsessives on the Reddit forum for lo-fi beats, which banned AI submissions late last year, recently despaired about how the scene has been “overtaken” and “lost its soul.” Some artists report losing significant opportunities and having to switch careers because of the genre’s downturn; others are paranoid, unable to discern the real from the hoax.

Mia Eden, a 23-year-old from Manchester, England, is one of a slew of lo-fi beatmakers who explicitly state that their videos are “made by real people” and free of AI. She runs a channel called Lofi Louis, inspired by the name of her friend’s pet rabbit, and records under the alias Rosia! She started making the music in 2021 after stumbling on channels like the infamous, perpetually studying Lofi Girl. Eden dug deeper and found the underground lo-fi scene, a community of artists who happily shared advice, made lo-fi beat-themed podcasts, and collaborated on compilations. Years ago, Eden earned anywhere from $500 to $1,500 a month from her songs getting slots on DSP editorial playlists; now, after the AI boom, that’s mostly dried up—Spotify’s lo-fi playlists spill with viral songs from suspicious profiles with no descriptions. Eden first noticed a dumpster’s worth of AI cover art, and then people full-sending the grift with AI music. She says she’s been tricked by some of her favorite channels starting to sneakily integrate AI.