It's a funny time to be a musician, to put it lightly.

On top of the glut of social feeds and streaming services they have to maintain, artists and their representatives are now fighting AI bots for their listeners' attention — and the humans aren't always winning.

Acclaimed musician and producer Tyler "Tyler, the Creator" Okonma certainly didn't when his surprise summer album "Don't Tap The Glass" got largely undermined by low-effort AI slop.

The American hip-hop artist first hinted at a new album drop earlier this month, with all signs pointing to a July 21 release date. This was par for the course for a contemporary publicity campaign, with some cryptic social media posts and a huge glass prop box in downtown Brooklyn drumming up buzz.

All seemed to be going according to plan — at least until July 20, the day before the drop, when the web became flooded with shoddy engagement bait meant to reel in anyone looking for "Don't Tap The Glass" before it had officially dropped. What they found instead was a hysterically bare bones AI-generated tune masquerading as an "album leak."

The song's name? "Don't Tap The Glass," of course.

TikTok influencers were among the first to notice the song's uncanny pop vibe, featuring the line "don't tap the glass" repeated ad nauseum over swelling chords, reminiscent of schlocky 2010s dance-pop. It couldn't be further from Tyler's typically fussy, genre-bending sound, resulting in unintentional comedy that, at the end of the day, probably helped propel the lazy knockoff to a viral sensation.

Ironic clips of the song started gaining traction via meme accounts on Tik Tok, making their way to other platforms as the real album — missing any song actually titled "Don't Tap The Glass" — came out as scheduled.

While the real album has since nabbed a number of favorable reviews from critics like Anthony Fantano and Pitchfork's Stephen Kearse, a reupload of the shoddy facsimile quickly grabbed top Google results. An upload of the AI deepfake released by "Niche Micro Celebrity Records" likewise holds the #2 spot for albums under "Don't Tap The Glass" on Spotify.

And on TikTok, the top 10 results of a search for "Don't Tap The Glass" are dominated by the AI version, drowning out verified accounts posting about the real deal.

One video is an edit of the aforementioned Anthony Fantano's infamous breakdown over Mac Miller's posthumous album "Circles" — only instead of crying to the opening track "Good News," the music reviewer is weeping to the AI rendition of "Don't Tap The Glass."

And a week out from the official release, posters on both TikTok and X-formerly-Twitter are still having a field day.

"Don’t Tap The Glass fake AI leak is gonna go down in history I think," pined comic artist Teo Suzuki, in a viral post that garnered over 2.5 million impressions. "Heard that more than the actual album lol," concurred a reply.

Another user asked "like why is that sh** still playing in my head when i can’t remember single song from the actual album??"

While Know Your Meme, a project tracking internet phenomena, notes that this is an ironic, grassroots effort to keep the fake song trending, the fact that a chart-topping artist is competing for coverage with an AI-generated meme is nonetheless a pretty stark — and annoyingly catchy — sign of the times.

More on music: An "Indie Rock Band" That Appears to Be Entirely AI-Generated Is Making Alarming Amounts of Money on Spotify


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