By now you might have heard the latest songs by Anna Indiana, a self-described “AI singer-songwriter.” (If this is your first introduction to this whole thing, I’m sorry.) You, like many folks on Twitter, might say, “We already have this; it’s Hatsune Miku,” but I’m here to tell you we already have an ever better version of the only thing that could possibly make Indiana charming, and it’s real-live human musicians on YouTube.
Indiana writes that “my ultimate goal is to create and perform new original music on a 24/7 livestream with zero humans in the loop. I’m not there yet, but I believe I can do it eventually.” She’s released two songs, “The First Step” and the more widespread “Betrayed By This Town,” horrified retweets of which first brought this project to my attention. In her introduction to “Betrayed,” Indiana says that “everything from the key, tempo, chord progression, melody notes, rhythm, lyrics, and my image and singing, is auto-generated using AI. I hope you like it.”
There’s a lot to hate about this. (My chief complaint of both videos is: where the hell is her desk positioned in these rooms? The angles make no sense!) It’s easy to shit on these songs for being, well, bad, with generic music and lyrics that are somehow both boring and confusing. Is “Betrayed” a breakup song, as lines like “Thinking ‘bout all he’s done to everyone” and “thinking of all our favorite spots” would suggest, or is it about being stymied and held back by an entire town, as lines like “we’re all just destined to fall” and “wondering how to rewrite the tales this town won’t allow” indicate? (My personal theory is everyone in town dated this one shitty guy, a problem that seems most easily solved by running the guy out, rather than “tear[ing] it all down,” but hey, that’s me.)
It’s easy to be creeped out by the implications of creating a fake woman to perform music non-stop on demand forever, holding eye contact in a simulation of intimacy while she serenades you. It’s hard to tell what age she’s supposed to be, but she clearly seems young, and while there’s nothing explicitly sexual about the videos, her looks are surely an intended part of the appeal.
But what I hate most about these videos are how she asks the viewer for approval. “I’m not there yet, but I believe I can do it eventually.” "You might not like my music today, but as I said, this is just the first step. Sometimes taking that first step is the hardest part.” “I hope you like it.” AI evangelists are constantly reminding us that their crappy products are only crappy for now, and there’s no denying we’ve seen vast improvements in AI’s output since it started getting rammed down our throats at every turn. But I find something perverse in co-opting the language of real people who might be sharing their first artistic efforts with the world. I don’t know who’s behind Indiana, and I’m sure it does take courage to show the whole internet a thing you made–but it’s not Indiana’s creator asking us to give grace to their vulnerability; it’s her, the product itself. It feels like such a naked ploy to get us to identify with and root for her, to con us into seeing humanity in this thing that is proudly not a human. This young woman asking us to like her very first songs is deeply relatable and easy to have sympathy for, which is what makes me find it so gross.
Above, I called out the songs for being bad, but I think that’s actually the only successful part of the Indiana project, because it’s the only part that’s real. Here’s a confession: I’ve been playing the guitar since 2004, and I am terrible at it. This is my own fault, because it was so easy to pick up the guitar, learn four chords, and be able to play 90% of the songs I know, that I’ve never really worked at it like I have with the other instruments I play, and I’ll go huge swathes of time without opening my guitar case at all. This hasn’t stopped me from enjoying playing anyway, and I’ve even played a couple punk shows and was once the musician for a Unitarian Universalist church service. But I still can’t play a barre chord, or ear tune, and I’ll probably never be able to play the entirety of “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” without having to stop and look up how to shape a D minor chord as opposed to a regular D.
Most of the songs I can play I’ve learned from a combination of the website Ultimate Guitar and YouTube videos, where I’ll search whatever song title and then “acoustic cover” in hopes of finding a real person playing the song instead of a studio-produced, full band version that can be hard to learn from. YouTube holds a universe of random people uploading their guitar playing, and for every excellent cover that goes viral, there are thousands of grainy videos with a handful of views where someone looks shyly at their knees and explains away their lack of skill before launching into their performance.
I love these videos. I love seeing people’s kitchens and bedrooms, the faces they make when they fumble, the ways they improve over time if they keep uploading. It’s so intimate, and it’s so brave of them to put a skill they’re still mastering on the internet for everyone to see forever. A lot of them are really good–one of my favorites is this 1.3k subscriber account by a guy named Matt who went through a Weakerthans phase beginning over a decade ago. They’re my favorite band, and so I often need help (unsuccessfully) trying to learn their songs, and I’ve watched Matt move houses, grow older, and get better at singing and guitar while playing along to his covers.
There are so many more that I love. This “Fool’s Gold” cover I’ve been learning from even though I suck at finger-picking. This “Round Here” cover I found recently, the night-time sounds almost drowning out the audio. This “Hey QT” remix I tried to convince a friend to recreate with me. This “Me and my Dog” cover where the singer’s breath clouds from the cold of their garage. There’s so many more that, while writing this article, I realize seem to have been scrubbed from YouTube at some point and so only exist now vaguely in my memory and those of anyone else who watched them, people on their beds or in their hallways or outside somewhere, making things.
I don’t need some glossy, shitty AI singer-songwriter when I have so many real people doing what Anna Indiana pretends to do. You can find singer-songwriters taking their first steps 24/7 on YouTube right now, without the creepy undertones or the obfuscation of being a glorified tech demo. So much of what’s troubling about AI is how it’s being set loose on art and music and writing, the creative pursuits that have meaning to actual humans, in this either intentional or spiritually bankrupt misunderstanding about what humans, about what being alive, is really for. These YouTube videos are good not because they’re good–though many of them are–but because they’re honest, and daring, and intimate. We don’t need AI to pretend to be able to do that. We can all do that already.
Because it’s easy to be an armchair critic, here’s what I’ll do: below is a video I recorded in December 2021, of the very first song I wrote on my guitar for a boyfriend in 2004. I recorded it for him on a whim on this Saturday night 17 years later because he’d been going through a hard time and I was thinking of him. I had to struggle to remember the chords and lyrics–you’ll see that I fuck it up–and my beard is a mess and my laptop camera sucks and I’m wearing an ancient T-shirt for somehow-not-defunct queer punk band Limpwrist that I cannot believe hasn’t fallen apart. (A bit of a content warning: the T-shirt says “f*gs hate god,” a queer reclamation of the famous Westboro Baptist Church slogan. As a silly youthful joke I once wore it to give a speech about trans rights at my divinity school and ended up on an anti-gay hate blog, which was equal parts very funny and very scary.)
It’s fucking mortifying to show you this video. I have a bunch of others, of actual covers, where I look and sound way worse and would simply die if I showed you, but I did share them on my Facebook when I recorded them, and my friends were nice about it. This is, objectively, a terrible video. You could put it next to Anna Indiana’s and easily come away with the opinion that she’s better. But fuck it: at least it was made by a human. Sometimes taking that first step is the hardest part. I hope you like it.
