A really nifty deep dive on the current state of #AI #VoiceCloning #music #CoverSongs, via getting the artists #WeirdAlYankovic parodied to ‘cover’ his songs
It mainly shows how distinctive Weird Al’s voice is, though MechaLorde singing ‘Foil’ is pretty good
AI has the potential to disrupt the whole comedy genre of pop-cultural pastiche and parody. Why would you watch comedians doing impressions of celebrities, or riffing on pop-culture texts, when you could just manipulate the celebrity yourself using AI?
Still, what constantly annoys me about the state of AI-driven parody (eg the meme of pop-culture characters as #Balenciaga models) is that the writing underpinning them is so poor
So even if we get to a point where we can completely puppeteer real people’s likenesses and voices, it still fails if there isn’t decent writing
Weird Al’s writing has always been excellent and hilarious. I mean, lines like in ‘Fat’, his parody of ‘Bad’: “When I sit around the house, I really sit around the house”
So far, that kind of stuff can’t be automatically generated – AI-created comedy is of the surreal and absurdist kind that reads as an unintentional, “machine-innocent” artefact of the generation process
waxy.org/2023/10/weird-ai-yank…
What would it sound like if the musicians parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic sang *his* parodies instead? I jumped off the deep end into the world of A.I. cover songs to find out, and the results are even worse than you imagine.
Andy Baio (Waxy.org)
