In a recent New Yorker essay, Kyle Chayka poses a scary question: When was the last time you had fun on the Internet?
For his example of pure online fun, he points to a retro Flash gaming site, but I have a more recent answer: The last time I had fun on the Internet was about an hour ago, when I found this tiktok account which uses ai to make Homer Simpson sing 90s and 2000s rock songs like “Smells like Teen Spirit.”
This visionary, who uses the nickname @mememusic117 – you are using a program called ai/”>Voicify ai to generate audio deepfakes, along with Blender to create the animated scenes.
I can’t understate the joy this TikTok account has brought me. Last night I woke up at 2am with a terrifying and unexplained allergic reaction, so I went ahead and canceled my afternoon calls due to the lingering consequences of having a human body in this mortal coil. But then the algorithm gave me a gift: I saw a low-fidelity signal. Homer Simpson singing a song from Queens of the Stone Age inside a Minecraft castle while Optimus Prime and Shrek dance in the crowd. It’s like I’ve had Benadryl injected into my veins, which doesn’t make me sleepy. In fact, these TikToks seem something that my brain would come up with into an antihistamine-induced nap, but I know for a fact that this is not a very realistic fever dream (because, as I discovered last night, I unfortunately don’t have Benadryl, which is a problem given the circumstances!).
This is the ideal use of ai: it has tangibly improved my day and probably caused no real harm in the process, assuming Homer Simpson’s voice actor and Brandon Flowers I can take a joke.
But, like many good things on the Internet, the more you think about Homer Simpson’s rock n’ roll cover band, the more you start to see the cracks forming.
On a Discord server, I linked to a video of Homer Simpson singing “You are mine?” by Arctic Monkeys and declared it my new favorite video on the Internet. But when I think about my other all-time favorites, there’s something cut right: Goofy singing “from Evanescent.”bring me to Life”, which was published 9 years ago and accumulated more than 11 million views on YouTube. Only in that video, the voice behind emo Goofy is a real person with real voice acting talent.
Can you compare the joy of Homer Simpson singing Green Day with the joy of a guy on YouTube who does a very good impression of Goofy while singing Evanescent?
Judging by @mememusic117’s work, Voicify ai has some pretty solid technology. Even so, any product that allows you to pay ai/how-to-make-ai-cover-songs”>manipulate an ai Taylor Swift or an ai Ariana Grande are going to raise red flags. Do you remember what happened when a Drake ft. The Weeknd generated by ai went viral?
The Drake/Weeknd song blew up to such an extent that Universal Music Group, the publisher that represents both artists,ai-created-a-song-mimicking-the-work-of-drake-and-the-weeknd-what-does-that-mean-for-copyright-law/”> filed a series of DMCA takedowns, to try to erase the synthetic work from the Internet. But the song persists, because once something goes viral, it can never completely go away.
Although some artists like YACHT strive to train an ai on their music to create new songs, artists like Drake and The Weeknd did not consent to their copyrighted artwork being manipulated in this way. But, as we’ve discussed at length, copyright law is not adequately equipped to make definitive judgments about which ai derivative works are fair game, so we’re in the Wild West.
When I see ai deepfakes of dead songwriters like John Lennon or Kurt Cobain singing contemporary songs, I don’t find it all that exciting. So why is Homer Simpson so elated covering Nirvana? Maybe it’s because Homer Simpson isn’t a real person, and we can revel in the silliness of it all without worrying about how deepfake technology is getting really, really, really good, and we still don’t know how to deal with it. But still, there is a real person who acts as Homer Simpson’s voice actor, and real people who wrote, drew, and conceptualized him.
Neither Voicify ai nor @mememusic117 responded to requests for comment. But I remained fascinated by this anonymous character @mememusic117, who has been posting on TikTok since 2020, primarily as a faceless meme aggregator. Now, the account is approaching 40,000 followers for its Homer Simpson covers, but each video has overlaid text crediting Voicify ai. The user could simply be giving credit where credit is due, but I have considered the possibility that this is a meme account run by the company itself, even if I have no concrete evidence.
In the hypercapitalist hell of the Internet, where almost everything we touch is smeared with the fingerprints of megacorporations or venture-capital-funded startups, I almost go out of my way to ruin my own fun.
