In a recent New Yorker essay, Kyle Chayka poses: Questions that cause fear: When was the last time you enjoyed the Internet?
He cites retro Flash game sites as an example of pure online fun, but I have a more recent answer. The last time he had fun on the internet was about an hour ago. This TikTok account Use AI to make Homer Simpson sing rock songs from the 90s and 00s.smells like teen spirit”
This Visionary – People using this nickname @mememusic117 — I am using a program called AI voice Generate audio deepfakes and create animated scenes using Blender.
I can’t underestimate the joy this TikTok account has brought me. I woke up at 2am last night with a horrible, unexplained allergic reaction, so I canceled my afternoon call due to the lingering effects of having a human body remaining on this mortal coil. But then the algorithm gave me a gift. Homer Simpson singing Queens of the Stone Age Optimus Prime and Shrek dance around in the crowd inside a Minecraft castle. It’s like Benadryl was injected into my veins to keep me awake. In fact, these TikToks look like something my brain would come up with during an antihistamine-induced nap, but I’m well aware that this isn’t a very realistic fever dream (because, as I noticed last night, Unfortunately, I don’t think so (I don’t have Benadryl, but it’s a bit of a problem considering the situation!).
This is an ideal use of AI. While the AI made my day visibly better, Homer Simpson and Homer Simpson’s voice actor probably couldn’t have done any real harm in the process. Brandon Flowers I can tell jokes.
But like many good things on the internet, the longer you think about Homer Simpson’s rock ‘n’ roll cover band, the more you start to see the cracks start to appear.
I linked to a video of Homer Simpson singing “” on my Discord server.are you mine?” on the Arctic Monkeys video and declared it my new favorite video on the internet. But when I think about my other all-time favorite songs, there’s something cut from the same cloth. Goofy sings Evanescence.bring me to life” was posted nine years ago and has racked up over 11 million views on YouTube. Only in that video, the emo Goofy voice is a real person with real voice acting talent.
Does Homer Simpson’s joy singing Green Day match the joy of the man singing Evanescence on YouTube and doing a really good Goofy impression?
Judging by @mememusic117’s work, Voicify AI has pretty solid technology. However, if the product is worth the price, Operate AI Taylor Swift and AI Ariana Grande would raise red flags. Remember what happened when an AI-generated Drake ft. The Weeknd song went viral?
This song by Drake and the Weeknd was released by Universal Music Group, the artists’ agency. Filed numerous DMCA takedowns I try to scrub synthetic works from the internet. But once popular, it never goes away, so this song has stuck around.
Some artists, like YACHT, go out of their way to train AI on their music to create new songs, while others like Drake and The Weeknd are worried that their copyrighted artwork won’t work like that. did not consent to be manipulated by However, as we have discussed at length, copyright law is not fully equipped to make the final determination as to what AI derivative works are fair game. Therefore, it is truly the Wild West.
I don’t get all that excited when I see AI deepfakes of deceased songwriters like John Lennon and Kurt Cobain singing modern songs. So why is Homer Simpson covering Nirvana so euphoric? Maybe it’s because Homer Simpson isn’t a real person, and deepfake technology is really, really, really Maybe it’s because we can enjoy the silliness without worrying that it’s getting great but we still don’t know how to deal with it. But still, there is a real person who is the voice actor for Homer Simpson, and there are 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 @mememusic117 character. He has continued to post on his TikTok since 2020, primarily as his aggregator of faceless memes. Currently, the account’s Homer Simpson cover has a follower count approaching his 40,000 followers, but every video comes with a text overlay crediting his Voicify AI. The user may just be giving credit where credit is due, but even without concrete evidence, we thought this could be a meme account run by the company itself .
In the hyper-capitalist hellhole of the internet, where nearly everything we touch is smeared with the fingerprints of large corporations and venture capital startups, I’m just going out of my way to ruin my fun.