People are using AI to generate hateful songs. I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
Yesterday at the Candian Music Week conference in Toronto, (June 3), I sat through several excellent panels and presentations on AI. It’s now becoming clear to me how this new technology can be of service and a force for good. I just need to figure out which programs to use to help me in my workflow and reduce the amount of drudge work I have to do.
There was one demonstration of a program called Udio that was prompted to generate a blues song about Canadian Music Week. It took about a minute to send back a 32-second clip that was pretty impressive.
But humans being humans (read: they suck), there will always be those who use this tech for things that may not be so helpful. For example, a company called Eternos uses AI to help mourners talk to the dead. They say it helps with the mourning process, but…well, who am I to say?
Then there’s this story from TechCrunch about how some techno-knobs are using generative AI to write songs that are racist, homophobic, and generally filled with hateful stuff.
A company called ActiveFence (they work to keep online platforms safe), there’s a lot of talk on “hate speech-related” online communities about how to use AI to write songs that incite hatred using all kinds of awful ethic, gender, racial, and religious slurs. Some of these songs are about terrorism, suicide, self-harm, and martyrdom.
Many of these generative music programs have safeguards that filter out the bad stuff, but the hate idiots get around that by prompts that spell Jews “jooz.” A common workaround for Satan is “say tan.” “My rape” can be circumvented with “mire ape.”
TechCrunch also says this:
“AI-generated hateful music is poised to spread far and wide if it follows in the footsteps of other AI-generated media. Wired documented earlier this year how an AI-manipulated clip of Adolf Hitler racked up more than 15 million views on X after being shared by a far-right conspiracy influencer.
“Among other experts, a UN advisory body has expressed concerns that racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic and xenophobic content could be supercharged by generative AI.”
Great. Just great.
