THE PAPAOUTAI EFFECT: AI DETECTION DOESN’T EXIST

It is 2056, and AI has taken over the world after the great tech apocalypse, birthing an autopia (automated utopia, get it?) where humans and machines are indistinguishable. Walking side by side in a seemingly fantastical world—the cyberpunk era!

Rewind. It is 2026, and the ease with which we are consuming AI-generated content, often unnoticed and sometimes unbothered, is deeply disturbing.

The Papaoutai Effect

You’ve probably scrolled past it or used this audio without even realizing it.

It sounds like a slowed-down edit of the 2013 EDM song “Papaoutai” (the English version of “Où t’es papa,” translated as “Where are you dad?”) layered with Afro influences. If my ears serve me right, I would say it is a blend of a familiar choir chant from L’enfer, another of Stroma's songs, heavily sprinkled with Afro-beat elements and what sounds like a Nigerian-inspired tone at the very end. It’s catchy, but its origin?

The original Papaoutai by Belgian artist Stromae has been a global hit since 2013, accumulating over 627 million streams on Spotify alone, ranking it among his most-played tracks and its official YouTube video has surpassed 1 billion views today. 

In contrast, the new Afro Soul version credited to Chill77, Unjaps and mikeeysmind, widely known to be AI-generated, has exploded on streaming platforms. In less than a month, it has racked up over 12–14 million streams on Spotify and climbed into the platform’s global charts, all while circulating widely on TikTok and social feeds. 

Spotify, the biggest culprit, acts as the server pipeline for this erosion of creative ownership, intellectual property and cultural context. The song credits Chill77 from Unjaps, an independent record label and production collective that focuses on cross-genre beats and digital releases, yet its link to Stromae’s original is buried beneath algorithmic remix culture. MAAD!!

On YouTube, the free video-sharing platform, countless uploads of this track under different channels have ballooned into over 2.5 million views across unofficial uploads. 

Putting the Metrics in Human Context

As of this new year, 2026, the global population sits at roughly 8.1 billion people.

Now let’s scale the numbers down to something we can actually feel:

• Stromae’s original Papaoutai

  • ~627 million Spotify streams

  • ~1 billion YouTube views. This means roughly 1 in every 8 people on Earth has streamed the song on Spotify, and 1 in every 8 humans could have watched the video at least once on YouTube. That’s cultural saturation. Canon-level!

• The AI Afro remix ~12–14 million Spotify streams. That’s about 0.17 per cent of the global population. Sounds small until you realise that’s the entire population of a country like Rwanda pressing play on a track with disputed authorship and blurred origins.

• YouTube reposts 2.5 million views across channels. That’s roughly the population of Nairobi encountering the same piece of content, often without context, credit, or consent from the original creator.

  
  

Why this matters

Platforms love to call these numbers “engagement.”But engagement at this scale is not organic, as we would call it in my field.

When millions of people consume the same AI-assisted or culturally extracted work, algorithms don’t just distribute content. They normalize it, validate it, and financially reward it. Each play becomes a vote. Each repost is a quiet endorsement.

So when we say “it’s just a song”, what we’re really saying is: Millions of people made the same choice, at the same time, without seeing the full cost.

That is the Papaoutoi effect: more than going viral— it is mass participation in cultural erasure, automed at scale.

Why do we love it?

Because the brain is wired to love catchy melodies. Music with strong, predictable melodic hooks stimulates dopamine release in the brain’s reward system, making us feel good and crave repetition.

Researchers have found that such patterns light up neural circuits tied to memory, reward and emotional processing, which explains why some songs stick in your head involuntarily, move you to tears and sometimes activate healing powers even.

The melody structures and rhythmic beats don’t just feel good; they activate parts of the brain associated with positive emotion, anticipation, and recall. That’s why even a reworked, derivative track can be irresistible: it plays on our neural wiring. They call it neural networks. This is exactly what marketers do, but not at this level. Resulting in an emotionally-pulling, familiar yet fresh, evoking but disregarding cultural appropriation, data augmented piece of generated work that is creative-passing.

This is no fair game, man vs machine. And for a non-living thing sure knows how to pull feelings it doesn't have—yet.

How is rewiring your cognitive function right under any government?? To what end?

The Tech Speed Problem

It’s no brainer that tech is evolving at warp speed, faster than most governments can even fathom keeping up. Nowhere is this more visible than in AI governance. The internet wowed us. AI will floor us!

In Kenya, the government has launched a National AI Strategy 2025–2030, designed to foster innovation while attempting to build ethical guidelines for AI use and deployment.

The strategy focuses on digital infrastructure, data ecosystems, and AI research and innovation, with governance and ethics as cross-cutting priorities. However, there is still no dedicated AI law in force. AI is primarily governed through data protection statutes and sectoral policies, with supplementary initiatives like the Kenya Robotics and AI Society Bill (2023) and the Draft IT/AI Code of Practice still in progress. So where does that leave us?

What do we do?

I remember once I almost got sued for not crediting a photographer on Instagram. Remember those repost days?

As a consumer, you should ask yourself: At what cost am I enjoying this good/service? Who profits? Where does the money go? Are creators being recognised for their authorship? and or compensated? Or are their art and identity being remixed into oblivion?

Once we pick a product, digital or physical, off the (digital) shelf, we are entering a silent agreement with the producer/manufacturer to trust them with our attention, data and cultural currency. In return, we expect value, transparency and respect for origin and ownership. When this covenant is broken, when content is stripped of context and lineage and served without accountability, the relationship shifts from mutual benefit to cultural extraction. It is cultural voyeurism at its best.

The Papaoutai effect is more than a catchy remix. It reveals a world where AI masks artistry and cultural labor, repackages heritage as anonymous entertainment, and accelerates appropriation while erasing credit and compensation.

Welcome to the glitch in the creative matrix!