Earlier this week, Bandcamp issued a blanket ban on generative AI and deepfake impersonations. This new measure makes Bandcamp an exception on the streaming landscape, were AI music is becoming more and more inescapable. Most of the reactions to this Bandcamp announcement were positive, but one artist who's not applauding it is Holly Herndon, an experimental artist who has long messed around with what she sees as the artistic possibilities of AI technology.
Holly Herndon has a PhD from Stanford's Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics, and she made her most recent album (2019's PROTO) with Spawn, an AI baby created by Herndon and her partner Mat Dryhurst. A few years ago,. Herndon and Dryhurst launched Spawning, a tool that allows artists to choose whether or not their work will be used to train AI, and that work earned them Austria’s first Digital Human Rights Award.
On Wednesday, in response to Bandcamp's new policy, Herndon tweeted:
Putting the ban in bandcamp!
It is a wicked problem so I understand what they are trying to do.
I’m sure the human moderators won’t be banning artists exploring AI, rather I hope will just be looking to filter out soundspam
The gray area will only get larger
After getting a negative response to that tweet, Herndon elaborated with a thread:
I understand why Bandcamp is taking this measure but it's a tourniquet
The human / AI binary is not going to hold, and will become a matter of superficial optics
I already have more authorship in my models than most pop stars do in their songs
People will already be using models to generate songs they then put a human filter on
Artists will integrate generated passages into works they orchestrate, and will soon train their own models
Another protection might be to flag accounts that post an inhuman amount of content, but that too may seem retrograde
We live with infinite media now
I encourage platforms to be more curated, but enforcing a hard human / AI binary is not the right way to address this long term
If an expert uses AI to help them write an article they otherwise would not have the time to complete, it will not be of less substance than a non-expert with time on their hands writing something by hand.
A practice, or reputation, of thought and work developed over time is the best filter.
The contemporary demand for 24/7 content from people is the problem.
She kept going with the conversation, and you can see some of her responses below.
I will announce if I have been banished
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
it is not destroying the earth.
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
It is here for good, so we have to have ideas to live with it. Avoidance will make things much worse.
It’s fine to disagree but I think that is hyperbolic. Data centers and Gpus are efficient and the models I train use much less energy than if I had played a game
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
Models are here forever, denial does more harm than good as anyone close to the field knows this
I make tools for people to release work as me without my permission so authenticity is not my concern
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
If people argue that those using AI models are less legitimate than those who are not on grounds of authenticity, my argument in the tweet challenges that claim
Those are complicated issues that differ by location. Increased demand for energy can bring prices down or up depending on capacity, and a gold rush mixed with terrible policy in some areas can cause problems.
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
Data centers and Gpus are very efficient, they have to be as the…
Ai models are here for good. Today you can run a Chinese open model locally that competes with gpt 5.
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
Every state of the art feature of models today will soon run on your desktop as an open model. It won’t go away.
Data centers are efficient (energy policy is not) so we can…
I’m not upset!I don’t think it will work.
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
We built something that was hard to build! You tweet insults!
What have you done?
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
That is true and I think already is the case for many people (definitely me)
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
Performing is a separate economy to passive streaming and competing for attention online which is more vulnerable to cheap media. Arguably performance becomes even more important.
I agree it is a spam issue
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 16, 2026
If someone only posts one song that came out of a model as a final step, how will we know what went into it
Bandcamp should curate for spam
I think they will too
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
I don’t think it will be so easy to distinguish soon though
it will have to be ok (thanks)
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
By human hours we practically lived in infinite media before too
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
It is good to curate environments to be free from spam but the distinction will erode
All I said is it is here for good so it is better to not avoid the issue but think of ways to deal with it
— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) January 15, 2026
