Pancakes
It was almost midnight and I was on my phone, watching a very big man make pancakes. Bald, black beard, round sunglasses indoors at night. A blonde woman beside him. A Viking hip hop song is playing, Blood Runs Wild. The channel is Bob Dominator.
He stands there confident, arms crossed, very staged. She plays along beside him. They look like a couple having a good time making a music video together. That is cute. Put the same man on a battlefield and he is a costume. Put him in this kitchen and I start to like him.
Under the video there is a small chip that says AI. Neither of them exists.
This is part of a book I’m writing in the open, AI Has No Morality. It Has Yours. Subscribe to get each piece as it goes out.
The scroll
YouTube knows what you do at midnight. It gave me more.
Ragal Ironbull and Valhalla Calling, 17 million views. Vyrma singing with a little girl. FREYVRA in braids on a festival stage. Olivia Asserson, Raise the Stone. Rovan Sigurd. Einar Solvik and Askvara. Bjorn Bonebreaker. All of them wearing the same small chip.
This has a name now. Know Your Meme files it as AI Viking rap, and also as Viking Music Slop. One clip by Draugr Balled passed 8.5 million views on TikTok, The AI Musicpreneur reports.
I tried to count the artists and I could not. The blonde with braids on one channel looks like the blonde with braids on another. It could be ten people. It could be one person with ten channels. I don’t know.
Then I opened the comments.
The song
Under Valhalla Calling, the comments I read are about the song and about the person writing.
One, with 525 likes, says this music makes you part of something bigger, like finally going home. Someone is 74 and got interested in the genre. Someone hears it 100 times a day and laughs about it. Someone asks why they feel so pumped up for something.
YouTube’s own AI summary of the comments picked out one line. This song has soul. Above it, YouTube warns that quality and accuracy may vary.
I wrote a chapter about this once, What Held the Pen. I said you can judge a piece of work from the page alone, without knowing who, or what, made it. I was arguing when I wrote that. Nobody here is arguing. They are just listening, and enjoying it.
The singers
The singers are a different matter.
“They are looking more and more real,” someone wrote under Bob Dominator, with 37 likes. That is what I felt in the kitchen. You only say it if you know they are not. In the same comment: when are we going to get a name for Mrs. Dominator? As far as I can see, nobody told them she is his wife. They married the two of them on their own.
Under a blonde singer, in Russian: “Damn, how I adore you. Pity you don’t exist.” 45 likes.
Under Rovan Sigurd: can’t stop watching the shorts. “I wish they were real though.”
I believe most of these people know it is AI. They don’t need to be told again. They want something else. Someone wrote in Thai that the two of them are so enviable, and wished them much happiness. Someone wrote in Romanian that they can’t sleep, and the song is now their ringtone. The singer is not real. The ringtone is.
So my clean argument stops here. A song needs nobody behind it. A singer you adore does. The man who wrote “pity you don’t exist” cares very much who held the pen. He wishes it had been her.
Two who belong
What makes them feel real is not the funny. It is belonging. Bob Dominator has his wife. Vyrma holds her daughter’s hand, and a comment says, my angel wolf has a cub. It even works on a talking orange cat. His fans can tell he secretly loves his kitten.
Then the audience wants to belong too. They ask her name. They wish the couple happiness. They put the song on their phone. One comment under Valhalla Calling said it already. Like finally going home, where you belong.
The makers know. Under many of these videos, a small heart with the singer’s face answers the comments. Next to it are the buttons, Join and Buy Super Thanks.
The machine does not want your money. Somebody decided to give her a daughter, answer in her face, and leave the button there. AI has no morality. It has yours. Here it has theirs, and your pocket.
Three stages
Loving a song does not settle where it came from. A real drummer reminded me.
El Estepario Siberiano is a real drummer. In a Short with 94 thousand likes, he shows a man reacting to his drumming. His name is Colby, he says. A father, a drummer, a terrific guy. Then he shows a woman who has also reacted to his videos, with hundreds of thousands of views. She doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a job. “She doesn’t have parents.” She is an AI.
He calls this the AI doomsday, and he gives it stages. It is the best definition I have seen.
The first stage is AI performers. Companies train on music and video without asking, he says, and then anyone with a keyboard can generate an artist performing anything. That is what I was scrolling.
The second stage is AI reactions. A generated face sits and reacts to a real musician’s work. He says that steals his work twice, once to train the performer and once to make the fan. I had not thought about this one. A reaction video exists so you can watch a person feel something. Here nobody felt anything, and the face still tells you what to feel.
The third stage is where he says we are headed. AI reactions to AI performers. You create the perfect musician, then thousands of bots react to it, giving the thing credibility. Then the cycle is complete.
He says people will soon listen to your prompt, “which is just a bunch of words.”
Mama
Then I found Bjorn Bonebreaker. Mama. Don’t Close Your Eyes. An old mother and her daughter on a stage, holding hands. A crowd behind them, crying. None of them exist.
The comments here are different. Nobody asks the singer’s name. People write about their own mothers. One cried, remembering a mother who passed away. One man wrote that his Mama died, and this song helped him through dark times.
The woman in the drummer’s video doesn’t have parents. Neither does this singer. But that man had a mother, and his dark times were real.
Nene
There was one more real thing.
Nene Royal is sixteen, from Phuket. She taught herself guitar from YouTube videos and played the night markets. This year she won America’s Got Talent, the first Thai to do it. At the finale she sang The Emptiness Machine with Linkin Park. Someone left a comment on Alex N Channel, a reaction channel. They did not believe she can sing. The instruments cover her mistakes, they said.
He did not argue, and he did not attack anyone. He took the band away and played only her voice and her guitar, live. Bohemian Rhapsody. Love of My Life. “Sometimes the best answer isn’t argue,” he said. “It’s the performance itself.”
The top comment says anyone who thinks she can’t sing may have had their brain rotted by AI songs. A Thai comment says you cannot listen with your ears only. You have to listen with your heart too.
So there are three sides, and I don’t have to choose. A man got through a bad year with a song nobody sang. A drummer is right that his work was taken. A girl from Phuket earned every note. All three are true at the same time.
What surprised me was smaller. All night I watched people beg singers who do not exist to be real. Nobody asked if Vyrma can really sing. Nobody said Bob Dominator’s band hides his mistakes. The woman reacting to the drummer’s videos doesn’t have parents, and nobody doubts her either. The only singer I saw doubted was the one who is real.
A human had to prove she can sing like a human.
Postscript
The last line became a song.
I wrote the words with Claudia. Suno made the voice and the music. The singers in the video don’t exist either.
Credits
Thank you to Alex N Channel, who answered a doubt about Nene Royal with her own voice and no argument. Thank you to El Estepario Siberiano for the three stages. Reporting from The AI Musicpreneur, Bandwagon and NBC Insider.
That’s the whole of this one. It belongs to a book I’m writing in the open, AI Has No Morality. It Has Yours. Subscribe and I’ll send the next piece when it’s ready.
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