This sublemmy has been a fascinating experiment into how your relatives “eat the onion”.

Yes, the tired joke is that reality is getting too ridiculous, but if you’ve been paying any attention to the AI music situation you have come to the glum realization that they can make Johnny Cash sing whatever the fuck they want him to, now. It’s very convincing. The “weird fingers” era of AI music was years ago, but people kinda missed it. Also, it sounded like Wagon Christ, so it didn’t matter. In hindsight, I hope that Bjork got a hook out of it.

Now we’re here, where they can make Johnny Cash sing a jingle for an insurance company if they can, and it just sounds like an outtake of his, maybe. For that matter, they can make your Mom talk, given a decent sample of her voice, and the sample is smaller than you might think. I would venture that a few minutes of her voice would do it. Black Mirror shit. It’s getting kinda hard to write scifi, lately, you have to pitch 1000 years from now and insist on FTL just to buy yourself some time.

This was your official warning, years late, everyone is paying attention to the visual results of AI, but the audio results got better, much sooner, and nobody really got hung up on it because we are visual monkeys, and it just did not strike us as headline news.

I feel like the automagic beat matching and tricks of something like Virtual DJ were part of the cutting edge of this “AI” thing that’s honestly harder to describe the better I understand the son of a bitch. The ability to speed up a recording without changing the pitch, ignoring the limits of vinyl, pretty much demanded making new material where the original artist just performed the song at a new tempo, in real time, on demand, but I was messing around with it as a hobbyist in like, 2015. I did not understand what I was fucking with, at all. I understood BTC well enough in 2012, but my time with Virtual DJ? I did not grasp it. If I had understood it, I would be much wealthier, only now do I understand Nvidia fanboys.

So now when they make Johnny sing, it sounds like Johnny. The only real tell is that it sounds like some old classic record of his, and not like whatever crisp thing it would be with his voice like old trees, if he was simply alive now and singing in 2024. But he always sounded like old trees. It just means they can make him sing Yellow Submarine, and you’ll be like shit, did I miss that episode of Sesame Street or something? This is great!

Nossir, I don’t like it.

It’s a graphic design thing? Tumblr and Reddit are kinda infamous for the thing where nobody reads screen names, so you end up reading a post from u/everythingipostisaboutpeopleatingshit so you get got every time you get most of the way through the post, and it’s about somebody eating shit.

Somehow my interaction with The Onion content had managed to slip through that perception filter. I tended to read The Onion articles by going to the website and reading the Sensible Chuckles. So they never really fooled me.

But aha. Reposition the presentation, and give us all a dose of Reality is Stranger Than Fiction, and suddenly here I am, going, yeah, that makes sense. I bet all the fucking phone calls came from call centers in India, kinda thing. Nah, bit right through the skin, like a sheep.