There's a viral tiktok song called RUBBERZ that is clearly generated by some low-rent generative audio model, presumably via the prompt "drake + pina colada song", where the artist behind it gave the most obvious lipsync ever to prove that the song isn't AI. He then did an interview with Andrew Callaghan where he atonally butchered his own lyrics.

It's like the whole world is getting Boratted except everyone can see through it and his brazen refusal to admit that he's lying only intensifies the spectacle.

This is the unholy dynamic powering much of the attention economy. Louis Theroux also studied it in his Manosphere documentary: the most shameless attention-maximizers can succeed because the algorithm lacks any ethical filter. As long as it's not illegal (or too close to kink), whatever captures people's attention is fair game.^🧊

I'm not plugged in enough to know if this is a tiny blip in the ocean of otherwise forgiveable content, or one bubble in a frothy wave of AI slop that is destroying our ability to understand reality. One data point is that comments left prior to @medasin's exposé seemed to earnestly enjoy Fenix Flexin's masterpiece:

So unless youtube comments are more of a dead internet ant nest than I want to believe, I worry for our illiterate and bamboozled teenagers.

This shit is straight out of the 80s and 70s 😂

As I always say, maybe it's fine. My generation had Friday by Rebecca Black and MLG memes and we're only somewhat fried and responsible for things like the current US administration.

There's something to the song: the fucked up metre, the vaporous clichés, the out-of-genre adlibs that Fenix actually ad'd himself.

Plastic smiles on Sunset Boulevard

Livin' fast and playin' every card

Broken hearts and bitter bills

Swallowin' these jagged little pills

Your messages are floodin' in (Floodin' in)

Thinkin' that you're gonna win (Gon' win)

I just let the rubber band snap

The Ouija board jelly-bean-guessing-game that is The Algorithm discovered something novel. Something ineffably noteworthy. It's given this rando his zero point five seconds of fame for it and will spit him out again shortly, giving all of us one more broken ceramic shard to make our mosaics of the 2020s with.

If it's not already happening, I won't be surprised when people start making art that intentionally emulates AI slop to argue that actually it's significant and interesting that a large fraction of people now think that the main thing about the 70s and 80s — two decades of complex, vivid, horrible and joyous human existence — is that they had particular cameras and instruments.