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In a late New Yorker essay , Kyle Chayka poses adread - induce question : When was the last clip you had fun on the internet ?
For his example of pure on-line fun , he points to a retro Flash gaming site , but I have a more recent solvent : The last sentence I had sport on the cyberspace was about an hour ago , when I foundthis TikTok accountthat habituate AI to make Homer Simpson babble ’ 90 and ’ 00s rock songs like “ Smells Like Teen Spirit . ”
https://www.tiktok.com/@mememusic117/video/7267181287461489953
This visionary — who use the moniker@mememusic117 — is using a program calledVoicify AIto generate audio deepfakes , along with Blender to make the enliven scenes .
I ca n’t downplay the pleasure that this TikTok account has bring me . I woke up at 2 a.m. last Nox with a terrifying and unexplained hypersensitive reaction , so I went ahead and cancel my good afternoon call due to the lingering consequences of having a human eubstance on this deathly coil . But then the algorithm bring a gift upon me : I check a low - fiHomer Simpson spill the beans a Queens of the Stone Age songinside of a Minecraft castle while Optimus Prime and Shrek dance around in the gang . It ’s like non - drowsy Benadryl has been injected into my veins . In fact , these TikToks look like something my brain would come up up with in an antihistamine - induced midday catnap , but I know for a fact that this is not a very realistic fever ambition ( because , as I discovered last night , I regretfully do not have any Benadryl , which is kind of an issue give the circumstances ! ) .
This is the idealistic use of AI : It has tangibly improved my day , and it probably has n’t caused any real harm in the process , seize that the voice actor for Homer Simpson andBrandon Flowerscan take a joke .
But , like many good things on the cyberspace , the longer you think about Homer Simpson ’s John Rock ’ n ’ roll cover version dance band , the more you start out to see the crack form .
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In a Discord server , I linked to a video of Homer Simpson sing “ R U Mine ? ” by Arctic Monkeys and declared it my new favorite video on the internet . But when I think about my other all - time front-runner , there ’s something cut from the same material : Goofy singing Evanescence ’s “ Bring Me to Life , ” which was posted 9 age ago and racked up over 11 million YouTube view . Only in that video , the vocalisation behind emo Goofy is a existent soul with real voice playing talent .
Can the joy of Homer Simpson singing Green Day compare to the delight of some cat on YouTube doing an passing good Goofy belief while scorch Evanescence ?
judge by @mememusic117 ’s work , Voicify AI has some fairly solid engineering . Still , any production that ’ll have you pay tomanipulate an AITaylor Swift or an AI Ariana Grande is go to raise crimson flags . Remember what hap when anAI - generated Drake ft . The Weeknd songwent viral ?
The Drake / Weeknd Sung gas up to such a degree that Universal Music Group , the publisher represent both of those artists , file a slew of DMCA takedownsto seek to scrub the synthetical study from the internet . But the call persists , because once something snuff it viral , it can never truly disappear .
Though some artists likeYACHTwill go out of their way to train an AI on their music to make new songs , creative person like Drake and the Weeknd did not consent to having their copyright artworks manipulated in such a direction . But , aswe’vediscussedatlength , copyright law is not adequately outfit to make definitive judgments on what derivative AI works are fair plot , so it ’s the Wild West out there .
This is more entertaining and elicits the same emotional reaction that Ready Player One was aim forhttps://t.co/EOgfvIVBPh
— åπd ® ew 🐢 🐢 🐢 ( @Andrew__Boley)October 18 , 2023
When I see AI deepfakes of dead songwriters like John Lennon or Kurt Cobain singe contemporary Sung , it ’s not that exciting to me . So why is Homer Simpson cover Nirvana so euphoric ? Perhaps it ’s because Homer Simpson is not a real person , and we can delight in the silliness of it all without care about howdeepfake technologyis stimulate really , really , really practiced , and we still do n’t make out how to deal out with it . But even so , there is a actual person who function as the voice player for Homer Simpson , and actual citizenry who wrote , drew and conceptualized him .
Neither Voicify AI nor @mememusic117 responded to request for comment . But I remained fascinated by this anonymous @mememusic117 quality , who has been posting on TikTok since 2020 , mostly as a faceless meme aggregator . Now the account is come near 40,000 following for its Homer Simpson handle , but every video recording has a text overlay crediting Voicify AI . The user could just be giving credit where it ’s due , but I have reckon the possibleness that this might be a meme report run by the party itself , even if I do n’t have concrete evidence .
In the hyper - capitalist hellscape of the cyberspace , where nearly everything we touch is stain with the fingerprint of mega corporations or speculation - funded startup , I ’m almost going out of the way to ruin my own playfulness .
AI euphony generators could be a boon for creative person — but also problematic
A new Drake x The Weeknd track just blew up — but it ’s an AI fake
