You might be listening to AI music

The band The Velvet Sundown broke through the music charts with millions of streams in months after coming from nowhere — and being an entirely AI band. Is it an existential threat to the health of the music industry and the internet when you can’t even tell if the “song of the summer” was sung by an actual human, or a robot? Music critic Anthony Fantano joins us to discuss. Anthony Fantano runs The Needle Drop, where he reviews albums and comments on the music industry. You can check him out there or follow him on Instagram @afantano. EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/panicworld Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.

• 0:30Ryan Broderick?

  Who's your favorite AI artist right now? Like, who are you listening to when it comes to AI music? Who?

• 0:36Speaker 02

  I think my favorite AI artist right now is a guy by the name of MGK. I don't know if you guys have heard of him. He's making some really good pop music as of late. He's got this album, Lost Americana, on the way.

• 0:49Ryan Broderick?

  Sure, yeah.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  It's just really groundbreaking for AI art. I've never heard an AI artist sound so real, so human, so authentic.

• 0:57Ryan Broderick?

  When I was listening to Tickets to My Downfall, deep in my COVID mania, I thought, you know what would make this better? If he danced.

• 1:21Ryan Broderick?

  So the reason I bring up your favorite AI music, of course, is because today we're talking about the proliferation of AI music right now on Spotify and other platforms. There's all kinds of music made with AI. It's getting like millions and millions of listeners a month. And most recently, we've had this band, The Velvet Sundown, that has broken out and gone very viral for being made, you know, because of AI and how it was involved. We're going to try to figure out if we should care about any of this. Is it an existential risk to the health of the music industry and the internet? I'm Ryan Broderick. This is Panic World. Joining me sometimes is our producer, Grant Irving. This is a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And joining me today is the internet's favorite music nerd, Anthony Fantano. Welcome to the show. How are you?

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Good. How are you? How are you?

• 2:05Ryan Broderick?

  I'm good. I'm hot, but I'm doing all right. I got an air conditioner pointed right at my face.

• 2:11Ryan Broderick?

  So when did you first hear about the Velvet Sundown? When did they come across your radar?

• 2:17Speaker 02

  I think before a lot of the major articles came out, there were a lot of fans of mine in my DMs, kind of like, you know, tipping me off, you know, to the whole thing. I don't know where like inklings or information started to leak about the band first, but like I was getting sort of like, you know, information about them or sort of people running across them and just voicing concern about them like, you know, as soon as there was like any kind of, you know, discussion about them. I think maybe around when they were just getting about maybe 100,000 or like a few hundred thousand monthly listeners. And it's funny, just all the fervor and discourse around them. I remember like

• 2:59Speaker 02

  with each new article that would pass every day, it'd be like, AI band manages to get a couple hundred thousand listeners. AI band has half a million monthly listeners. AI band has like 600, 100,000 monthly listeners. Like you guys, you guys are making it worse.

• 3:16Ryan Broderick?

  Did you, did you clock that they were AI when you first heard them?

• 3:21Speaker 02

  I mean, you don't even need to hear their music. Like literally all the band photos look AI.

• 3:26Ryan Broderick?

  Right. So there are a ton of lawsuits right now that could change the way generative AI works legally. But right now, there is only one legal ruling from the US Copyright Office, which basically says that to copyright or trademark anything involving AI, you have to prove that it was sufficiently altered by a human being. So before we like launch into sort of how we got to something like the Velvet Sundown happening, I wanted to ask you your thoughts about. AI music and how it fits into sort of the history of music and technology. Cause it's something that I've sort of struggled with myself trying to trying to figure out,

• 4:06Ryan Broderick?

  okay, is AI music just a souped up version of the same debates we used to have around sampling? Is it something wholly different? Where do you kind of fall on? And there's also of course, like a couple of different ways that AI can be incorporated into the music production process. So like, what's your sort of general take on it? Are you totally anti? Are you sort of wait and see? How do you feel about it?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Problem I primarily have with the generative stuff doesn't even kind of really come down to, I think like the process of it, or whether or not it's like, you know, ruining creativity or anything like that. I mean, I think there's like an argument to be made there with those things. My issue primarily though, currently right now, there's like no set standards or expectations in terms of like training these AI models on certain artists' music.

• 5:01Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  It's essentially like sampling with extra step. You're you're sort of giving it a series of sounds and ideas. Maybe it's even breaking it down to the bare bones beats and melodies that are working into these songs. And you're sort of like trying to teach it these ideas. But I mean, those ideas are based off of the original copyrighted works of other artists and rights holders and so on and so forth. We've seen numerous examples of AI generated tracks turning up out of nowhere that have a vocal on it that sounds exactly like Future or exactly like Young Lean or exactly like Ariana Grande, because it's literally taking those sounds and just kind of like finding ways to copy them over onto different melodies or other sort of like musical ideas.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  I feel like there should be some kind of like credit owed to the artists whose music and original works are being, you know, used to train these AI models. But again, as of right now, there's like no real expectation with any of that stuff. I'm gonna continue to sort of like be against, you know, these sorts of models and usages of AI for as long as like artists aren't like, you know, being compensated fairly for the way that their music is being incorporated into it.

• 6:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it definitely is exploiting artists.

• 6:16Ryan Broderick?

  Or at the very least, it's ripping away any of the human creativity that they're providing. It's a shuffle button for a bunch of different musical ideas. And, you know, I don't want to sound too corny, but there's not really a lot of soul in that. Like, it is, by definition, extremely, you know, unhuman, very synthetic. And not in ways that are particularly interesting, you know, the way like a synthesizer might be synthetic.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  I mean, I have reviewed and I have had positive things to say about records, for example, from artists like way before this was even a discussion topic in a broad sense, who have used AI in their music, but what they did was they trained it or incorporated elements or recordings of music that they themselves made, you know, or had some kind of like controller ownership of. Like, if you want to train AI or feed some kind of AI model music that you made, you know, and that you own or you have some kind of like control over and that's your thing, I mean, I guess go for it, you know, if you feel like that helps your process and gets you to where you want to go creatively, I think that's cool. Mostly what I see AI getting used for now, you know, is a way to sort of like launder stealing, launder sort of like this false creativity.

• 7:26Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I think it's good that you sort of pointed out like the differences in AI here. So when we're talking, we're going to be specifically talking about generative AI, which is a type of artificial intelligence that, you know, can generate content. To start here, our story, the first kind of musical AI generation platform was Suno in May 2023. They seem like the biggest one, and when they launch, it only takes a few months for users to start messing around with it. And that brings us to like the next big milestone when we're talking about AI music, which is, do you know Glorb? Have you heard of Glorb?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  I've not heard of Glorb.

• 8:01Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so Glorb is a YouTube channel, Glorb the Bottom Two. It's uploaded on YouTube and it's an AI sponge, you've probably actually seen it, it's AI SpongeBob. And he's shooting guns and he's like driving around in a car.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  I know, I've seen like the AI SpongeBob like rap videos and stuff like that.

• 8:19Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and I remember when I first saw it kind of... I try to look out for things that feel new and I feel like with AI that's like especially important because AI can't make anything new like humans have to do that part. And so I remember thinking like huh, this is, this is like a new thing, I think. Although like I think you could argue that like a human being did most of the interesting stuff with like the AI SpongeBob videos. Like the AI didn't make the videos, it made the music.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  It made, I mean, to the degree that it made the music, I'm not entirely sure. I mean, what seems apparent though, you need a human there singing or rapping or saying the words and it's the AI that's sort of like, you know, changing the voice to sound like whatever it's trying to like impersonate it as. I mean, it's essentially kind of like a deep fake thing, you know, which I mean, like I have, I have issues with that insofar as is it, is it or is it not being used deceptively? If it's being used in a way that's sort of like in the spirit of parody and people know that you're just like kind of taking the piss and that it's not like that deep and it's that serious and like, you know, you're making a, I don't know, Peter from Family

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Guy having a conversation with Stewie about, you know, like the

• 9:35Ryan Broderick?

  Emotional hardcore or like

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Emotional hardcore, like, you know, what Marx would have thought about La Booboo's or something like that, you know, like, you know, if that's how you're using it, I feel like that's more or less fine. You know, there's legal precedent defending, you know, the existence of parody.

• 10:03Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I'm glad you brought up parody. You did the thing I love when our guests do, which is you did the transition here for me. So the next sort of big moment in AI music is May 2024, when the obscurest vinyl Facebook page launches and they're basically doing like Photoshop's of fake albums and then they start making AI versions of the fake songs from those fake albums. And do you know about this page at all? So like, it's like a Facebook page. So it was like, it was sort of like an AI souped up version of like

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Oh wait, I think I remember what you're, you're talking about. Like, um, I've seen a god. Some of the ridiculous songs they've made have like gone viral.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Like some songs about like balls and you know, whatever. Like I'm trying to remember what the hell it was. But like I think I know exactly what you're talking about. Like the songs sound like they're from the 50s and the 60s. And like they have like kind of a, an old school girl group kind of like appeal to them.

• 11:01Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. And they've got titles like I glued my balls to my butthole again.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:23Ryan Broderick?

  And they have hundreds of thousands of views. They've got millions of listens on Spotify and.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think that's where the, the BBL Drizzy sort of like.

• 11:32Ryan Broderick?

  That's exactly where we're headed.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Similar vibes, uh, you know, the BBL Drizzy kind of like came out of the same process that ended up getting sampled into that beat.

• 11:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So this is exactly where we're headed. So, uh, of course, uh, your, your good friend Drake then releases, uh, Taylor Made Freestyle in April 2024. This is starts the Kendrick Drake beef and by May 2024, Metro Boomin releases BBL Drizzy, which features an AI sample. What is your take on the AI dimension of BBL Drizzy?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Again, it was sort of like done and released in the spirit of like parody and comedy and just like kind of the silly, haha, we're not taking that seriously kind of thing. But in the wake of that, you know, you've had artists like, um, JPEG Mafia and even Lil Wayne on his latest record, like drop serious, like this is supposed to be some of my best work to date, you know, type rap songs that, that feature prominent AI generated samples of either songs or music that sounds like it's from that era, or it's like kind of trying to capture that same sort of energy in a certain kind of way. I mean, I don't know if you guys heard the new Lil Wayne album, but there's like a whole opening track that features like these

• 12:41Speaker 02

  sort of like, uh, harmonious, like group choral, almost like, you know, soul group type vocals and, uh, they're singing about, you know, Lil Wayne and Mr. Carter and so on and so forth, and doing so in a way to where it's like, okay, so this is literally about you. Like this is very specific, like this sounds like a sample of a soul song from like the 60s or some bygone era, but it can't possibly be that because it feels anachronistic due to the fact that the lyrics are literally fucking about you. You know, it's like this weird anachronism thing, just like the BBL thing, because obviously there'd be no reason for there to be a soul song from that time period singing about Drake's BBL.

• 13:20Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Do you feel like there's some historical precedent there? I feel like hip hop is genuinely considered an early adopter to technological trends with music. Like they were very early with a lot of this stuff. And so I think it's fascinating that it's happening again. Like rappers are like, yeah, I'm just going to generate a sample and I'll fuck around with it. And like, that's, that's what it's going to be.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  And electronic music too, but especially hip hop has this knack for just kind of like taking whatever is out there in the cultural zeitgeist or the cultural ether and just like finding a way to flip it and incorporate it into what you do so that it becomes like a part of your work. Because I mean, with a lot of rap music, I mean, currency is usually pretty important, you know, making sure that the listener feels like that, you know, when they're hearing your track, it's a representation of the here and the now. And like the exact, kind of like current paradigm that, yeah, not currency monetarily, like currency in terms of like right now, you know?

• 14:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  In terms of like, you know, acknowledging the listeners, like paradigm that they're in, like right now, the moment that they're living and breathing at that moment that they're listening to your song.

• 14:30Ryan Broderick?

  When the BBL Drizzy song dropped, I started to try to mess around with different AI music platforms because I wanted to try to figure out like, like which one made it because just not only is it hard to figure out like where the information that creates the AI is coming from, because they're all in this black box, but also it's hard to figure out like how you even did it, right? So I, I played around with Udio and Suno. And I asked them to make a 2000s emo song written from the perspective of Elon Musk getting dumped by Grimes, which was interesting. One of them changed Grimes in the song, song's lyrics to Weird Elf Wife, which I thought was like pretty smart, pretty, pretty well done.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  That sounds like you telling it Grimes and then going out and searching and finding maybe like one of the first things that somebody had written about her.

• 15:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I knew that she's an elf.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  It's like, who's this, who's this woman? Is she a weird elf wife or something? That, that sounds like something an Elon Musk fan would say.

• 15:26Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  When, when they see them out together, like who is this weird elf wife he's with?

• 15:31Ryan Broderick?

  We eventually learned that Udio is the platform that creates the BBL Drizzy sample. It was generated by a comedian named King Willie Onis and the lyrics were not AI-generated. So this was the last big AI moment before Velvet sundown. But before we totally move away from this, it's been kind of forgotten. I forgot it actually until we started recording this, that Drake was using an AI gimmick as part of his beef with Kendrick Lamar. Can you, can you sort of break down the differences between how Drake used an AI version of Tupac on one of his songs versus how Kendrick and Metro Boomin, his producer, sampled BBL Drizzy?

• 16:12Ryan Broderick?

  Because I actually think within that dynamic is, for me, the clearest depiction of what any kind of future AI might have in music or creativity. I think that's sort of the, the dynamic here.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  No, I mean, they're, they're different functionally and they're different culturally too, because you're talking about something that is generative AI and then it's being sampled and then it's being used in something else, which I mean, there's ethic issues around, but different ethic issues than we're kind of like, you know, talking about in the other example. The ethic issues here are based mostly around like, is there maybe two, three, four different soul groups whose production, musical ideas, vocals, instrumentation were essentially lifted to create that piece that was then sampled and used in another song? That's an ethics issue there. The ethics issue in the other instance is you are sort of like embodying someone else's voice. Where do you draw the line around that per se?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Could I hire a Dead Ringer Tupac impersonator and have him on the song? And have him rap the things that I want him to rap? You know what I mean? Like, where do you draw the line? It's still very much in bad taste because using Tupac's voice, you are representing feelings and ideas and emotions that you have no way of knowing whether or not the man himself would have endorsed. You're using his voice and his likeness to basically support and argue for ideas and feelings that frankly, he may have been disgusted with on some level. As well as also, you know, let's just say for, you know, history's sake here and remind everybody, also advocate that Kendrick bring up the weird pedo allegation stuff.

• 17:57Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  And dare him to mention it.

• 17:59Ryan Broderick?

  How did that go? What happened after that?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  How, yeah, what did happen after that? I don't know.

• 18:04Ryan Broderick?

  What happened?

• 18:04Speaker 02

  I know there's a lawsuit going on right now, but I don't know. So it's like literally using his voice to goad him into talking about stuff that he's now taking issue with him talking about. Uh, but yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's quite, I guess you could say like, uh, disrespectful, you know, and on a level that, you know, goes beyond like, uh, just sampling the guy's voice and maybe a song that he would have hated. Who knows?

• 18:28Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's definitely like functionally different than let's say like the Chappelle Show skit where like they're doing the new Tupac songs that like referenced modern day stuff, you know, cause he's not dead.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

• 18:42Ryan Broderick?

  Knowing Drake and like how basic Drake is like, I'm sure like that was the pitch in the room, to be honest. Uh, but like, like if there was a moment, if you like, it feels like if there was a moment to convince listeners that this was a problem and it mattered and should be talked about, like we kind of blew past it last summer in a way. Does that, does that clock to you?

• 19:03Speaker 02

  I mean, again, like with a lot of things, I feel like, uh, the problems with it lie underneath the surface and come out mostly in the way that the sausage is made. You know, it's like, I mean, you know, AI, AI generated music is a problem in the same way that like, you know, phones are a problem.

• 19:24Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  You know, but the thing is like, when you look at the phone and you hold the phone and you're using the phone, there's nothing about it that confronts you with like, the exploitative slave mines they need to dig minerals out of to, you know, uh, to use for the technology in the phone. You know what I mean? And the thing is like with an, with an AI generated song, there's nothing about the song that when you hear it, unless it's like literally a dead ringer for another artist who's not getting credited. That confronts you with the fact that like, there were seven artists who were stolen from, not paid and not acknowledged in the process of creating this track.

• 19:59Ryan Broderick?

  This perfectly sets up for Velvet Sundown, who despite being obviously AI slop and like literally the whole thing is just, you know, an AI prompt that's playing out. They also appear to be offended by the fact that they're being called AI slop and people are saying that they're generated entirely by AI, at least sort of. We're gonna get to how complicated this gets in just a second.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  There was all sorts of like weird public statements and gaslighting going on with like some of the fallout from them being sort of called out as an AI band and people just being like, none of these people even tried to go to a live show where you performed. And it's like, when are people supposed to do that asshole? You know, it's like, I think I responded to one of those tweets. I was just like, shut the fuck up. You know, this is lame as hell.

• 20:47Ryan Broderick?

  Actually, wait, hold on. I was a Velvet Sundown fan in June.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  You were in the Velvet Sundown mosh pit.

• 20:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I was on June 5th, 2025. I was there, man. You were only there on June 15th, 2025.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:59Ryan Broderick?

  I was there at the beginning, man.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. No, they did the whole thing where they were like, everybody go this way, everybody go that way. Now crash into each other, you know? It's like they had a wall of death going on. They're like, yeah, the Velvet Sundown wall. Were you there for the Velvet Sundown wall of death? It was so good, man. It was so, whoa. Those are the craziest wall of death I've ever seen. crazier than Slipknot.

• 21:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, but I think your point is right. With AI, it's never the one thing in particular. It's the bigger problem that it causes. We're not talking about, you know, some kid in his bedroom, AI generating a guitar riff and then remixing it and putting his own drums or his own synths around it or rapping over it or whatever it is. We're talking about someone who's generating full albums, a full band from the machine and making, yeah, slop.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  If from the outset, when a Velvet Sundown song came on, like there was some kind of like warning label or something to tell the audience that like, what you're about to hear is a fake ass song from a fake ass band that stole from these bands from this platform. You know, not everybody, but a great deal of people would like, you know, sit up and be like, I don't want to hear that.

• 22:13Ryan Broderick?

  So how would you describe? So I want to circle back to Velvet Sundown. How would you? Just, how would you describe the music? Cause I would say it's like, I don't know, like the worst older brother rock music you could imagine. Like it's like a dream of a black light poster filled bedroom. Like it's, it's, it's, it's got that uncanny thing you mentioned where it's like clearly not possible to be from the time period it's supposed to be from. But it, it, it's just like this miasma of like, I don't know, it's not jam band.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  It's, it's just a pastiche of just basically every generic rock sound that you could imagine. Like it's basically the musical equivalent of like, if you were forced to at gunpoint, write an essay about all the important rock music of the sixties and the seventies. But then you were told like, you know, the moment that you put pencil to paper, that you were limited to 500 letters. You know, you're like, well, yeah. How am I supposed to write about all the great rock music of the fifties and sixties and seventies? In 500 letters, what the fuck are you talking about? You know what I mean? Like you would end up with just like the most surface level gloss over of like, whatever that time period was artistically.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  And of course, like with all that compacted information, you're not really going to dig deeply into much of anything. So the, the music just kind of like ends up sounding like this pastiche of a bunch of different things from that era. And now I will say like, you know, there are elements of the, of the AI incorporated into making the Velvet Sundown's music. That is deceptively good because hearing maybe like one or two of those tracks in passing, you would think like, okay, that kind of said, that's passive. It sounds like a band, maybe not a great band.

• 23:55Ryan Broderick?

  I would drive drunk to this music, you know, like that's the kind of genre it is.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  When you listen to the entire album, you're like, how is this a band? This sounds like eight different bands.

• 24:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Like it feels more like a compilation, you know? And the only, the only thread kind of like, uh, holding it all together is this like really vague notion of like, yeah, sixty seventies music, man.

• 24:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Some of it's kind of bluesy. Some of it sounds like a really shitty Black Keys ripoff.

• 24:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, AI music and the Black Keys sound very similar, actually, I gotta say.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  You know, they really, they really gave him the blueprint on that one.

• 24:30Ryan Broderick?

  Describing the Velvet Sundown's output is really funny because as you're sort of trying to like, pinpoint what it sounds like, what is really silly here is like they put out their first quote unquote album, which is called Floating on Echoes, which is very, you know, on the nose. It was uploaded to Spotify on June 5th. They then put out a follow-up album on the 20th of June.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, they put out the two albums and the two covers look almost like identical.

• 24:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. People immediately noticed their AI. It blows up on the anti-AI subreddit. A user writes, "Not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed. AI-generated artist photo and album covers. Description reads like ChatGPT. M-dash is included, which isn't fair. Journalists were using M-dash as first. They just, AI stole it from newsrooms. I want to make that clear. I'm an M-dash fan." And then a woman on TikTok said that it was the first song on her Discover Weekly. And then by June 25th, the writer and content creator, Chris Dalla Riva, makes a TikTok about how you can tell it's AI. Now, do you know about sort of the hallmarks of like, you know, like the fingers thing with images? But do you know like the certain hallmarks of like AI music? Like how to tell?

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Personally, at least one of the kind of giveaways for it, for me, when I heard the Velvet Sundown for the first time, I was listening to all their songs. There was something about kind of the recording that sounded to me, and it's difficult to describe, and I don't know if this is sort of like a tell for other people, but like the quality and the texture and the aesthetic of the instrumentation sounded like a combination of kind of like a super old-school tape recording and on top of it, like a really bad MP3. Like if I was listening to like an original master recording of a Doors album, but it was like a 128K MP3 that I downloaded from Napster, you know?

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Like it's something in between there. Like it sounds like something bad, which I know a lot of people don't have that reference point because like they didn't grow up downloading music, you know? But it sounds like a combination of-

• 26:24Ryan Broderick?

  The audience of this podcast definitely did. A real geriatric millennial audience here, so.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's, it sounds like a combination of like a bad MP3 download and just like a really old-school tape recording. And for me, whenever I hear like that mix where it sounds like kind of squishy and scuffed, like a squishy and scuffed combination of those two, to me, that's usually a tell that it feels like kind of AI.

• 26:45Ryan Broderick?

  I wanna, I wanna read this one sort of description so of Velvet Sundown before we go to the break. So in Chris Dalia River's video, he describes the metallic sound in the singer's voice. The song titled Dust on the Wind is a whole lot like Dust in the Wind, obviously. The photos are clearly AI-generated. Their bio at the time included a fake quote from Billboard, which read, "They sound like the memory of something you never lived and somehow make it feel real," which is awesome.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  You know, if you or any of your listeners go into that like whole spiel, that whole description, like, one of the funniest things about it to me is like how inadvertently backhanded it is, because there's multiple sort of like descriptors in there that mention just like how easily their music like slips into the background and how much you don't really need to pay attention to. And it's like, wow, riveting. That's, that's so incredible. I love that this band like makes background music.

• 27:40Ryan Broderick?

  Right. They make muzak, basically. And we're gonna, we're gonna talk about what happens once the rest of the internet discovers the Velvet Sundown, right after a word from our sponsors who are absolutely real human beings selling real products that you can buy.

• 27:55Ryan Broderick?

  People want to take away your access to the internet in all kinds of different ways. So you should get a VPN. NordVPN, it masks your IP address, it changes your browser's location, and it makes your online life just a lot easier. And it's pretty easy to use. You connect with one click, or you can use their automated connection feature to protect yourself without having to even do anything. They have over 8,000 servers in 126 countries, which basically lets you change where your computer is logging in from. So if you're in America and in a state where you're not allowed to access certain websites, you can change your IP address to come from a country that has proper internet privacy laws. Even better, NordVPN has one of the fastest VPN connections on the market, and one account works for up to 10 devices.

• 28:38Ryan Broderick?

  To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/panicworld, and that link will also give you four extra months on the two-year plan. There is no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link in our episode description, nordvpn.com/panicworld, to get that discount.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones. Like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones. Like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 29:29Ryan Broderick?

  You kind of knew from the get go that something was up with this band. You kind of knew that they were AI. Things get really weird though, when journalists start poking around, like the Rolling Stone team, trying to figure out like who is responsible for this. And that's when we see on June 29th, which is like four days after Riva's TikTok video, and a Twitter account appear for Velvet Sundown, which posts absolutely crazy that so-called journalists keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that the Velvet Sundown is AI-generated with zero evidence. And then Rolling Stone writes their story about it. And they put in their piece, "The streaming service Deezer noted that some of the tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence. The site Music Ally determined that most of the Spotify playlists which featured the band came from just four Spotify accounts.

• 30:14Ryan Broderick?

  And no one could explain how the band's catalog ended up on a playlist of songs evoking the Vietnam War."

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Which I thought was hilarious because like, uh, what?

• 30:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And I want to talk about sort of like, I want to stop here for a second and just sort of talk about streaming platforms' role in this. Because yes, Spotify, I think, has gotten a lot of attention for allowing AI music to, you know, spread across the platform. But this is happening almost on every platform in the internet that features music. And so, I mean, from your point of view, as someone who works on YouTube, you work closely with the, you know, these places really well, like, do they not seem to understand that this is a poison pill for them inevitably? Like, does something like you, like, does a platform like YouTube not seem to understand that like, if it's all AI? The whole thing goes bust.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Well, from what I understand, and I have not seen a lot of people covering this too widely. I have mentioned this offhandedly in my videos recently. YouTube, from what I understand, does have like pretty effective and extensive sort of like, you know, programs when it comes to like recognizing certain patterns and things and information. And, you know, especially when it comes to like copyright and music and various sorts of media being incorporated into whatever is being uploaded to YouTube. And they have taken some initiative lately in announcing that when it comes to AI-generated content.

• 31:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  I guess officially now, according to YouTube TOS, and I don't know how they're enforcing this, but still, they've said that you're not supposed to be able to monetize it.

• 31:47Ryan Broderick?

  Right, I saw this as well.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  So I don't know, you know, again, like how extensively that's being applied. What if I shoot a video and I don't know, it's a partially AI-generated script or something? Like how AI is to AI? And what are you using on the backend to sort of like recognize this? Because as we have seen repeatedly with most instances of AI, the people who are generating it and uploading this stuff are not coming out and admitting off the bat that this is like AI. So, you know, you would have to leave it to platforms like YouTube to do whatever they're supposed to on the backend to kind of like, you know, detect it. And how they're detecting it, I don't know. I imagine that there's probably going to be at least some AI that's slipping through. And then from there, you know, if they're faced with a situation where some of this

• 32:33Speaker 02

  shit is actually going super viral and actually generating them quite a bit of money, you know, that's going to require somebody, you know, behind the scenes to be like, this is getting a lot of hits, this is generating a lot of revenue, this is getting engagement, but we have made this commitment and we do have to sort of like, you know, nip this in the bud. Unfortunately, there have been instances of stuff in the past where YouTube has been like, you know, allegedly wholly against something, but like the moment that it actually started generating revenue, maybe it's like not so bad.

• 33:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, very funny how that works.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  I'm glad that they've come out and said this statement and that they're, you know, at least like vocally starting to make this commitment. I just hope they sort of follow through with it.

• 33:14Ryan Broderick?

  I'm also just like fascinated by the idea that like, say something like Deezer or Spotify or Apple Music. I'm fascinated the idea that they think that people would just happily sit and listen. Unthinkingly to music to such an extent on their platform and pay for the privilege of doing so that they would just listen to AI slop all day. Like I, I, maybe that's naive of me. And maybe like the scale that they're at, they're looking at people's user behavior and going, yeah, people don't care. It's just music. But I, the idea of taking money away from real artists and just monetizing AI slop and then being able to listen to it infinitely just seems like the end of everything in a way.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  We're really at a point where we are starting to kind of just begin to see what the internet is going to look like. You know, it, it really is just like sort of becoming like almost impossible to avoid, you know, because even if you're blocking like some of the most notorious accounts for posting this stuff, there's more just sort of popping up every day. It's, it's again, becoming difficult to just not see.

• 34:17Ryan Broderick?

  And it's clearly adding to sort of the unreality of the internet. Like you can't really trust what you're looking at or listening to. And in fact, this is a twist in the Velvet Sundown story, which going back to the Rolling Stone article, they end up quoting a spokesperson for the band, Andrew Felon, which is a great name for reasons you'll understand, just a second tier listener, who said to Rolling Stone, personally, I'm interested in art hoaxes. We live in a world where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real. And that's messed up, but that's the reality we now face. It's marketing, it's trolling, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And of course, we then discover the next day that this guy has nothing to do with the Velvet Sundown project in any

• 35:00Ryan Broderick?

  way. He is just a random guy that claimed to be their spokesperson and got interviewed by Rolling Stone.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  That's hilarious.

• 35:06Ryan Broderick?

  It's, it's pretty good. And he continues to post from the account, even though everyone knows it's, it's all bullshit. So you, you mentioned this in the first section of the episode, but almost exclusively, this stuff is being used by bad actors. So far, and I, and I stare at a lot of AI stuff, you know, just through the course of work every week. I have not come across a person using AI for a good reason. Like I actually haven't found one yet. I keep waiting for that moment where someone's, you know, we had this with sampling where you had like kids who didn't have money or access or talent to, to play like instruments, using sampling as a way around it and like creating music. And so there was that whole narrative in the very beginnings of sort of like hip hop blowing

• 35:51Ryan Broderick?

  up. Like that's what it was for. I am not actually seeing that with AI. I'm not seeing stories of someone being like, "Yeah, I actually didn't have any access to like music production tools, so I generated an AI beat and I wrapped over it." Like, that's not actually happening, which I think is, for anyone listening to this who's like on the fence about this stuff, like, that to me is a massive tell, that like, no one is genuinely embracing this stuff, except for Lil Wayne, apparently.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  I think a lot of artists just don't really understand what the protocols could or should be, and a lot of artists understand that like, because of the history of sampling and the way that sampling works, you know, everybody wants to sample, but nobody wants to be sampled, and sort of have their ideas completely taken from them and then have no recourse whatsoever, when it comes to like, actually being able to get any sort of credit or payment, you know, for the way that their music or ideas may have been incorporated against their will into that sort of thing. Sampling could have very much brought us in the same direction that generative AI is very much right now, but the thing is

• 36:56Speaker 02

  like, the moment it started kind of taking the music world and the country by storm, like, the labels were very litigious, and they were very active, I mean, sometimes I would say unfairly, early on, you know, where it's like, some artists would kind of like, skate by, and a record like, for example, Paul's Boutique, you'd never be able to make that record today unless you just had the most massive budget, but because that record dropped when it did, and was made when it was, it kind of got a little grandfathered in, you know what I mean?

• 37:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  So, because there are at least some levels of expectation now, and there's all sorts of like, you know, ways through which people can go after you legally, if they do catch you sampling, without any sort of like, you know, acknowledgement, you know, there's a lot of people who are sort of like hesitant now, or they're wary, or they're careful about it. These days, right now, there's no such protections around AI, and part of the reason that that is, is like, the labels aren't really doing much of anything to curtail it, and I have a working theory- On why that is is like, you know, the three majors are kind of like sitting back and just letting this

• 38:09Speaker 02

  kind of broil and bubble up and just do whatever it's going to do until it gets to the point where it's actually like generating some serious cash and then they can sort of like step in with millions of dollars and be like, give us this, you know? And then then we get to own it and we can have some kind of like proprietary control over it. And then, you know, we basically have the catalog that we can just feed it. And then, once they do that, they're just going to start fucking AI generating their own artists.

• 38:41Ryan Broderick?

  Well, so this is what's really interesting here. So we have the platforms that are allowing bands like Velvet Sundown to rack up million millions in views, you know? It's unclear. I have not actually seen anything about how, if they've made money off those, you know, downloads or streams or whatever.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Like from like from Spotify, you mean?

• 38:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like I'm not clear if they're if they're making money.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  I would suspect, yes, I would. I would suspect, yes.

• 39:06Ryan Broderick?

  If that's true, that's really interesting because right now there's only basically one piece of legislation, one kind of ruling in America about AI content, which is from the US Copyright Office, which basically states that you cannot trademark any AI generated content unless you can prove to the US Copyright Office that you changed it in some meaningful way. That's that's the only thing we've got here. So if you look at the landscape right now, and I'm there's no way that like a platform like Spotify can knock down every single AI generated artist that's filling up the platform and using it to just sort of passively make, you know, micro sense or whatever off the play. So we are leading to a legal doomsday situation where these bands are Velvet Sundown didn't change anything.

• 39:49Ryan Broderick?

  You can't, for most of the platforms like Suno or Udio don't even let you export stems, you know, like for listeners, that would be like the pieces of the song that you could then put together in an audio workstation to make, you know, into something new, like they're not even doing the BB Eldrissi sample thing. So it's hard not to think like, you know, six months, a year from now, there's just going to be a mass lawsuit frenzy as, as, as you said, the labels realize we can just generate our own Ariana Grande songs for for all eternity.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a potential future in which that happens. I guess it's just kind of a question of like, who's going to pull the pin out of the grenade, you know?

• 40:26Ryan Broderick?

  They're all waiting, yeah.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  I have a hard time seeing Spotify being responsible for that because I mean, even before the velvet sundown, there were already AI-generated tracks on there making money proliferating throughout tons of playlists, you know?

• 40:40Ryan Broderick?

  Of course.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  At this point, we have countless cases of random songs from random no follower, no following, no presence, no brand, no nothing accounts that like have these songs that have tons of streams because they're on these playlists and outside of those couple of tracks on the Spotify platform, they don't have any other catalog to speak of. That's just happened so many times at this point that it's kind of just hard to sort of see it as, oh, well, this is just a coincidence that just keeps happening over and over and over and over and over and happens most specifically and most often on Spotify. In like in comparison with every other music streaming platform out there that also has playlists and also has playlist curators and also most likely has some AI-generated

• 41:25Speaker 02

  music on the platform too, you know? And we and we've already-

• 41:28Ryan Broderick?

  Can you imagine the, wait, wait, can you imagine the kind of sicko that's like sitting and listening to AI-generated music in high fidelity on Apple Music? Can you imagine the absolute psychopath that is doing that?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  There's already stories and, you know, interviews backing a lot of what I'm saying in a recent book by Liz Pelly called Moon Machine, where she talks about the cottage industry around artists, which has already existed for years, where, you know, studio musicians and session musicians will basically like sort of make a fake band profile and they will essentially, you know, for Spotify, be going into the studio and like cutting these like, you know, really generic two, three minute bland instrumental cuts like for a random jazz playlist, just to fill out time because Spotify makes money off of those. And, you know, they're just like trying to create a playlist experience that

• 42:22Speaker 02

  is less likely to make people click away. So you just like put in as many tracks that sound exactly the same as possible. So nothing's like drawing your attention to the shit. So like, there's already cottage industry around this sort of thing. The only thing that AI has ushered in now is like, now they're just auto generating, you know, the muzak. They're not paying other artists to make it.

• 42:42Ryan Broderick?

  It's the dream of every platform to finally just auto generate the endless content stream. You need to keep people locked in. But after the break, we're going to talk about the mindset of the average platform music enjoyer and whether or not they care about this stuff. But before that, a word once again from our very human and very real sponsors, because the only thing better than human beings are brands.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones like protecting your home and auto with progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. Hey, listen. Power up your play with Nintendo Switch 2 and experience Link's legendary adventure. Now reborn in vibrant detail on our fastest and most powerful system yet.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  And harness the power of the Ocarina with the built in microphone.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive game and system sold separately. Game rated everyone 10 and up.

• 44:13Ryan Broderick?

  So the Washington Post did like a man on the street article where they asked people about the Velvet Sundown, kind of ask, you know, asking if they cared about it. And some people cared about it. Some people didn't, but they also quoted this yoga teacher who really did not care about it. Byron Day Marseille, great yoga teacher name, initially heard the Velvet Sundown's Drift Beyond the Flame. Dude, these song titles are so fucking bad. In a video of someone dancing, before long, he worked the song into a yoga class, not realizing AI was involved. It's got this emotional tone to it. It's so good for the end of a power yoga or vinyasa, where you're deeply stretching, said Marseille, who plans on continuing to use the song in classes. Which I can't really think of a more cutting

• 44:56Ryan Broderick?

  display of musicality there than like, it's good for my yoga class, actually.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, we kind of like, one of my favorite things about music is how it's something that you can experience almost anywhere and it's something you can bring with you a lot of places and it's something that can complement a lot of different sort of like experiences and activities and, you know, I mean, it's one of the reasons that we associate music so often with like certain experiences or memories and so on and so forth, but like, you know, this has kind of like led to, I think, almost like an abuse of the art form in a way to where, you know, I feel like as music fans allegedly, I think there's just too much acceptance or expectation

• 45:45Speaker 02

  that music more often than not be functional. And we're concerned.

• 45:50Ryan Broderick?

  I see what you mean, yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  We're concerned more with like whether or not it enhances an activity or sort of like a task we have to do versus is it good? You know, is it good? Is it quality? Is it like speaking to a human experience, our soul, whatever you want to refer to it as. And, you know, unfortunately, like with that expectation or that need that does increase the likelihood that like, you know, you're going to have AI models that'll step in and be like, yeah, I'll make some soulless bullshit that you can have on to do this thing that you are trying to do, you know?

• 46:24Ryan Broderick?

  I hadn't thought about that, but that's really interesting where if you create an ecosystem where you're supposed to listen to music all day long. Obviously, like, music can't be your sole focus. And I'm not saying that like you have to sit in front of like the radio and like think about the music you're listening to. But it has led to an environment where not only are platforms creating playlists like to fit your mood, but they're also creating playlists to fit where you are. And more importantly, they're creating playlists to fit what you're doing as just like a world of music. And there's obviously never going to be enough human made music of a certain quality. Like, cause you can't be listening to like Daniel Johnston in like your yoga class. You can't go find outsider art to fill those gaps with.

• 47:07Ryan Broderick?

  You have to find pastiche level, nothing music to just listen to. And that's where AI fits in.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's, and there's always sort of this expectation, this hope from people who sort of like want these sorts of playlists and want these sort of experiences that the playlists or the music they're being exposed to that serves this purpose be new. You know, so it's like, even, even if like I myself, which maybe I could, you know, if you tasked me with like, I want music to listen to at the library. Sure, like if I devoted a week to it, I could probably make a playlist of, you know, songs that potentially lasted hours of perfect library accompaniment jams, you know? But the thing is like, you know, you can't do that forever. Eventually you're going to run out of stuff that sounds like it would fit that mood.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  So, you know, you're either going to have to be constantly digging for new artists that speak to that, which obviously is very difficult and can be a chore. Or, you know, you just use some program to make the stuff just out of thin air.

• 48:07Ryan Broderick?

  Ian Bogost in The Atlantic touched on this same idea and kind of went even a bit further into a direction that I hadn't really considered, which is if you make music more utilitarian to fill up blank spaces, it starts to separate, you know, from what it used to mean culturally. And so Bogost writes, "Music used to define someone's identity, punk, rock, country, alternative, and so forth. Asking what music do you like could elicit a person's taste, values, and fashion sense. The rockers might hang out behind the gym and smoke cigarettes. They were, I, I was with the ska kids watching the Digimon movie. That's where I was. They were a clique, just like the jocks and the nerds. Finding, joining, and deepening a connection to a music subculture required effort. You had to find the right venues, records, zines, or crowd. In that era, music was tribal. Not so much today.

• 48:52Ryan Broderick?

  The internet has fragmented and flattened subcultures. And AI music slots perfectly in there where it's turning the whole thing into just a vibe that you don't even have to focus on or think about. There's no, there's no way you could attend a Velvet Sundown concert, although I'm curious how that would ever work if an AI band got popular enough. Like, would you have a Gorillaz situation? Would there be like multiple cover bands? Who owns it? How does it work? But all that stuff gets flattened by AI, like completely.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Hear me out here, you know, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate for a second. If we did end up in a situation where fake AI-generated bands.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Has hit record on Spotify.

• 49:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  And they're generating millions of streams and lots of interest in getting, you know, lots of monthly listeners. And then that puts the people responsible for it and the label in a position where they're like, well, we need to make some money on this on the tour. And then they actually end up having to hire real life human musicians to play it. Like, that would be an instance of AI leading to human employment.

• 49:50Ryan Broderick?

  So. Yeah. That could work. I mean, it could work.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Which, I mean, you know, right now, human musicians generating human music can't even create situations where humans are actually being able to get out there on tour. So maybe what we need is AI to start making the music so that we actually end up sort of like performing live in front of people.

• 50:07Ryan Broderick?

  Look, Machine Gun Kelly needs all the help he can get. And if an AI can figure out a way to help him sound better live. So you'd mentioned like, you know, how prevalent is this stuff? Like, and we don't have a lot of hard data, but I do want to hit this before, before we kind of close out this section. Apple and Spotify, they're not flagging anything as AI. Like, they just don't even, they're not, they're not tracking it. Deezer, which is a music streaming platform that appears to only exist in advertisements on bus stops and in Germany, I guess, reports that 18% of new tracks uploaded to Deezer are AI generated.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're at least trying, from what they say, to make note of when it is on there.

• 50:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I shouldn't make fun of poor Deezer. They are, they, they, they are at least doing something good here. And Spotify will remove accounts that release fake songs by real artists, which is another decent step. Maybe they can figure out how to remove that Romanian electronic artist from Owen's page, the emo band, because that keeps popping up while they're in there. But almost none of these platforms are going track by track. And, and, and it's even less clear, you know, to figure out what happens when these things go viral. What I wanted to end on, did you get a sense that Velvet Sundown had fans, like actual, like fan fans?

• 51:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 51:27Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  You know, look, I mean, I

• 51:32Speaker 02

  I'm well known on the internet for my opinions.

• 51:34Ryan Broderick?

  Sorry.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Comes to, you know what, yeah, I know, believe it or not. When it comes to music reviews, I'm often the first person a lot of people think of. And when I do give an opinion of something, especially when it's a strong opinion, it has a tendency to reach that crowd of people it would, that would disagree with it the most first.

• 51:53Ryan Broderick?

  Ah, yes.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  So when I do say something more often than not, that people find disagreeable, whoever may be disagreeing, disagreeing with it. I hear from them pretty quickly. You know, there are a few things over the course of my career, which I think I've come out against that I've gotten as little pushback as I have on this. You know, so if there are Velvet Underground, you know, I'm sorry, Velvet Sundown, hardcore Velvet Sundown fans out there. If the fans are out there, they're, they're very silent and they're, they're clearly not willing to come up and, you know, stand up for their favorites, even when I'm in their replies, telling them to shut the fuck up. So, you know, where are the sundowners in my emails threatening my life? You know, it's like, I'm gonna cut your fucking head off for not, for not respecting the Velvet Sundown.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  They're a real band, bitch.

• 52:41Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, as long as they don't like, create like a festival called like Sundown Town. I suppose that's probably fine. Although who knows, like, I'm, I'm sure we're not far off from like some weird right wing, like embrace of AI music as like, this is our music, like this is real music.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  That's, that's already happening. Have you not seen like the shitty pro Elon Musk Trump thrash metal on, on Twitter?

• 53:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, but I make those though. That's, that's my, that's my side gig is making Elon Musk AI music.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  I got it.

• 53:11Ryan Broderick?

  Could you ever see a world like, I guess this comes back to my like, be more interesting about this stuff? You know, problem, but like, could you see a world where like, there's a human fan base for an AI group? And if so, like, what do you think it would be?

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Like, look, I, I think, I think it's possible, but I think there would have to be like more human.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Intention behind it, sort of like even kind of thinking to the techno cult thing that you were just saying, like if somebody used an AI platform and we would have to rewind a few years, but if somebody used an AI platform to come up with a DJ that does nothing but sort of like make QAnon techno.

• 53:55Ryan Broderick?

  QAnon techno is so fucked up.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Exactly. But the thing is like, it wouldn't be entirely sort of AI generated because there'd need to be some kind of like main brain behind it, you know, sort of like, you know, typing the queue posts in their verbatim and, you know, being like, oh, you know, all the queue transmissions, make sure they're in the lyrics. Okay. So that, you know, the QAnon fans hear them. But like, everything else, I guess, could be AI generated about it.

• 54:18Ryan Broderick?

  I got one. I got an idea. It's an AI artist that makes Christian rap songs about abstinence and not masturbating. And you could tour it in churches. I think it would kill. I think it would crush.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 54:31Ryan Broderick?

  I think it'd be, it'd be so good.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  I don't think Christian youth camps would have any sort of like, you know, I mean, you know, like you, you would need to go into the Bible and find out whether or not AI is an abomination.

• 54:44Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know. Is it?

• 54:45Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? It's, I don't know if AI is an abomination. I mean, you know.

• 54:49Ryan Broderick?

  That could be in our next episode of Panic World. I wanna, so the last thing here is I want to run through a couple ways to identify AI music if you come across it in the wild. So we talked about the basslines, but also bad rhymes. AI can't really understand like the difference between a rhyme on the page and a rhyme with your mouth. It uses a lot of borrowing. So you kind of mentioned this, like it's stuff that sounds like other stuff. It does not understand song structure, really. Like, it's a lot of bridges that kind of go to nowhere. And this is a really interesting ghost instrument. So it's, it's like the, the AI thinks that there might be horns there, but it doesn't generate the horns, or it won't generate the marimba or whatever, but you can kind of still hear

• 55:32Ryan Broderick?

  it because of the frequency. So if you come across that stuff, listeners, you know that you're listening to AI generated music and then you can decide whether or not you want to live a life without happiness and human joy and keep listening to it or not. It's up to you. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was a delightful conversation. Usually I ask our guests, like, where can people follow you online? But that seems ridiculous. So how would you rate this conversation? What would you give it?

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'd give it a strong nine. At the very least, I'd give it a strong nine. And yeah, as you said, you know, all you got to do is look up Anthony Fantano on Pornhub.

• 56:07Ryan Broderick?

  That's right. That's actually, I bet you they have the strictest AI guidelines of like any platform.

• 56:15Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected].

• 56:56Ryan Broderick?

  Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can. Just a quick reminder, our Patreon is only 50 cents this month. To celebrate our one year anniversary, you can go to patreon.com/panicworld and use code PANICYEAR, all uppercase. Panic Year.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.