B2 Listening: AI Music is Ruining YouTube (English Listening + Free PDFs)
- Alex
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Level: upper-intermediate (B2)
This listening exercise is ideal for B2 upper-intermediate English learners and ESL classrooms. Download and print the PDFs for classroom use. Thank you for using my resources. If you have any feedback, please email me: alex@englishalex.com. I love hearing how students and teachers react to my materials so that I can improve them in the future.
Check out the listening page for more practice resources.
PDFs (Teacher copy includes suggested lesson plan and answers)
Sample lesson plan
Warm-up: Have you listened to AI music or seen AI art? How do you feel about it?
Read the comprehension questions.
Listen to the audio two times. Answer the questions as you go.
Listen a third time and read the transcript at the same time. Write down any words, phrases, or ideas that are new or interesting to you.
Discuss vocabulary and ideas questions.
B2 Upper-Intermediate English Listening Comprehension Practice: AI Music is Ruining YouTube
Comprehension Questions
What kind of music does the speaker enjoy listening to on YouTube?
a) Classic heavy metal music.
b) Classic video game music.
c) 1980s electronic music.
Why did the speaker click on the video?
a) He had used the channel before.
b) The thumbnail looked nice.
c) The title made him curious.
How did the speaker feel when he started listening to the video?
a) He liked it.
b) He didn't like it.
c) He was confused by it.
As he continued to listen to the music mix, how did his feelings change?
a) He liked it more and more.
b) He felt like something was wrong.
c) He felt angry.
How does the speaker describe the YouTube channel that he visited?
a) He calls it an AI slop channel.
b) He calls it an AI art channel.
c) He says it's a great channel.
How did the speaker feel about the creator of the channel?
a) He admired the creator's creativity.
b) He didn't like the types of videos the creator had created.
c) He said the creator didn't really create their art.
What does the speaker say about people who say "Great work!" under an AI-generated music video.
a) They are bots.
b) They don't listen long enough before posting.
c) They're allowed to feel how they feel about the videos.
How does the speaker feel about AI art in general?
a) He thinks it can be useful.
b) He thinks it misses the point of art.
c) He thinks we won't be able to fight it in the future.
Transcript
Like many people, I use YouTube to listen to music. I especially like listening to classic video game music and to musicians' interpretations of it. However, something has happened recently that has made my YouTube experience—and the experiences of most YouTube users—absolutely terrible: the birth and growth of AI music.
Let me tell you how it started for me.
One day, I was browsing YouTube when I saw a recommendation for a Final Fantasy music mix. If you don't know, Final Fantasy is a very popular video game series that started in the 1980s. Anyway, the mix was two hours long, and the thumbnail art looked nice enough. When I clicked on it, it started out pretty well. The feel of the music was nice and familiar. I then scrolled down to the comments to see what people were saying about the video. There were many people praising it and saying "Great work." So, I continued listening to the track and after about two or three minutes, I started feeling...weird.
Something was wrong.
The music kind of sounded like Final Fantasy, but it really wasn't. The melodies were wrong. Maybe one or two notes sounded similar to a song that I knew, but the rest of the track felt like a bizarre interpretation. I looked at the comments again and saw a couple of people asking "Is this AI?" or simply saying "AI slop," which is a term for AI-generated art whose goal isn't to inspire or to create something that lasts, but to get a quick reaction from people. It's garbage art that is meant to get your attention and your click, and that's about it. The quality of the art doesn't matter.
So, the next thing I did was go to the user's channel. I quickly realized that I had clicked on an AI slop channel. This user had created over twenty music mixes in six months, and each one was at least two hours long. If you know anything about music production, you know it takes a long time to write even five good minutes of music. This person had created over forty hours of it.
Scratch that. This person didn't create the music. The AI program they used didn't even create the music. The AI program generated the music by choosing from billions of sound samples that humans had already written, then mixing them in a particular order.
I really hated this experience, and I continue to hate it today. Since that first click, I have been fooled by a video or two that looked promising, but which ended up being just another mix of AI slop.
Oh, and I don't believe for a second that people who say "Great work!" under one of these videos listen to more than a minute of them before they post their comment. If they did, they would realize that these AI mixes don't have soul and that they sound repetitive, unoriginal, and boring if you listen to them for more than five minutes.
The worst part about all of this? It's everywhere. If you click on just one of these videos, YouTube will push twenty more of them into your feed. The only way to escape them is to click on the "not interested" or "don't recommend this channel" button. So, that's what I'll keep doing while continuing to look for human-made art.
To sum up, I'm not against the advancement of technology. I think that AI can have useful applications—I just don't think that generating art is one of them. When you remove the artist's struggle from the creative process, you miss the point of creation.
Answers
b
b
a
b
a
c
b
b
Related Pages
For a more advanced article about AI art, read this piece in The Guardian by Eric Reinhart.
Note: This text was written by Alex, a human. It was not generated by AI. The image at the top of the page was created in Canva.