SiriusXM DJ Plays AI-Generated Metal to Demonstrate How Awful AI Is, Confuses Listeners
What’s the best way to warn people about the dangers of AI? With AI, of course. At least, that’s how metal writer and broadcaster Ian Christie decided to do on his weekly show on SiriusXM’s channel Liquid Metal, Bloody Roots, a show where Christie dedicates each episode to specific eras or styles of metal. For his most recent episode, entitled “Roots of Metal’s Worst Nightmare,” he took a deep dive into the threat that AI poses for the genre.
For the record, these songs aren’t going into regular rotation on the station or anything. It was a one-time thing for Christie to demonstrate what AI metal sounds like. And, he did it without warning. After about 30 minutes of AI-generated metal, Christie came on to say (as reported by Lambgoat):
“I’m sorry to do that to you without warning, but indeed, about half an hour there of AI generated metal tracks that I put together in less time than it just took us to listen to them. Welcome to Roots of Metal’s Worst Nightmare. Each week here on Roots, we go decade by decade, year by year, country by country, key moment by key moment. But today, dialed right into current times and the existential threat to music as we know it, and particularly metal by artificial intelligence. Algorithmically derived music written on the fly by software, based on the averages of listening to and stealing ideas from thousands of metal riffs and metal albums. Creating an in the can vocabulary that just formulaically regurgitates elements to form something that sounds kind of like metal, in fact, is even better educated and more well-rounded than some metal bands, and yet at its heart is nothing but filler. I’m very sorry not to tell you in advance that was going to happen. I don’t usually like to trick you, but I felt like you had to really. To really feel the horror and the terror of what this stuff is, you kind of had to slowly realize you were listening to fakery.”
Unfortunately, not everyone stuck around long enough to hear Christie’s explanation, and some listeners got pissed. In the r/MetalForTheMasses subreddit, one person posted a thread with the headline:
“So they’re playing ai metal on the radio now?”
The thread has been up for a few days now and very few people in the comments have even figured out the point that Christie was trying to make. So I’m not sure that the moral Christie was trying to impart made it to all of the listeners.
If you want to catch the episode yourself, it’s still airing one more time this week, tomorrow (Halloween) at 9 p.m. ET on SiriusXM’s Liquid Metal.
