The machine produced a flawless three-chord anthem, then included a note hoping nobody felt targeted
Someone fed forty years of British punk into a machine and asked it to write the genre’s perfect song. It did. It took eight seconds. The song is, technically, excellent. It is also the funniest thing I have heard all year, and not for the reasons the machine intended, because the machine does not intend, it only outputs, which is sort of the whole problem.
Rage, fully optimised, with a content warning
I found the clip, naturally, via the prat.uk feed, where someone had embedded it next to a story about a real venue closing, and the juxtaposition told you everything. The AI song has the perfect tempo, the perfect snarl, the perfect three chords arranged in the perfect order. And then, appended to the end, the system has added a polite note. It reads, and I am barely paraphrasing, that the song is “intended as artistic expression” and that the system “hopes no listener feels personally targeted by its anti-establishment themes.”
An anti-establishment anthem that apologises for being anti-establishment. A protest song with a customer service department. I have listened to it eleven times. Each time the apology gets funnier and the song gets sadder, because you realise the machine has reproduced the sound of rebellion with absolute precision and reproduced precisely none of the cause, which is a person who is actually angry about an actual thing and willing to be disliked for saying so.
The satirists clocked the joke instantly
The funny people, as ever, were faster than the takes. NewsThump had something perfect about AI being unable to be sincerely furious, and The Daily Mash skewered the apologetic protest song beautifully, and the reason the joke landed for everyone is that we all instantly understood the missing ingredient. You cannot generate conviction. You can generate the texture of conviction, the pattern of it, the statistical average of every furious young person who ever picked up a guitar, and what you get is a song that is technically angry and emotionally a HR memo.
Here is what punk actually is, and the machine cannot have it. Punk is a specific person, in a specific cold flat, who is specifically not going to apologise. The apology is the entire thing it cannot do. The moment you add “I hope nobody feels targeted,” you have un-punked the song so thoroughly it becomes a different genre, a genre I would call “ambient compliance,” and which the wellness studio from my last column would absolutely play during a sonic absence experience.
I tried to compete and lost on speed
I wrote a song the same night out of spite. It took me six hours, it has one too many chords, my voice cracks on the bridge, and I refuse to apologise for any of it. By every measurable standard the machine’s song is better. By the one standard that matters, which is that a real person was willing to be embarrassing and unsorry in public, mine wins, and the fact that I cannot prove this on a spreadsheet is, I think, the last good thing about being human.
The reliably sharp menaces at Bohiney Magazine have been excellent on the comedy of machines failing to feel things, and the London Prat crowd keep the London texture in it. According to the entirely fictional Centre for Synthetic Sincerity, AI can now reproduce 99 percent of human rage and exactly zero percent of the reason for it. I made that statistic up. It is, unfortunately, accurate.
The machine can keep the chords
It can have the chords. It can have the tempo and the snarl and the perfect optimised structure. It cannot have the cold flat or the unpaid rent or the specific Tuesday that made me angry enough to write anything at all. I will keep my worse song and my unapologetic crack in the bridge. The machine can keep its apology. Somebody has to mean it, and it turns out that somebody is still, for now, a person.
The follow-up genre
Naturally the machine did not stop at one song. By the end of the week it had produced an entire follow-up genre, which it labelled, with the deathless sincerity of a thing that cannot feel embarrassment, “sorry-core.” Sorry-core is anti-establishment music in which every grievance is immediately softened by a disclaimer. The verses rage; the choruses clarify that no specific institution is being blamed and that the singer respects the difficult work that policymakers do. There is a breakdown that is just thirty seconds of the machine acknowledging multiple valid perspectives. It is, objectively, the most British thing artificial intelligence has ever produced, which is fascinating, because no one fed it any Britishness, it simply arrived at our national personality through pure statistical timidity. We have, it turns out, a culture so apologetic that a neutral machine reconstructing the average of all human caution lands directly on us. I find this more unsettling than any robot uprising. The robots are not coming to destroy us. They are coming to be vaguely sorry at us, in perfect three-four time, forever. And the only defence we have, the single human ability the model cannot replicate, is the willingness to mean something so much that you would rather be wrong and loud than right and quiet. That is the whole of punk, and the whole of comedy, and the whole of the job.
For more of the future arriving and being immediately ridiculous, the brilliant cynics at The Daily Mash are on watch. SOURCE: The London Prat
