I was doing a little house cleaning on my day off since I’m a party animal and wanted to listen to a little music while I worked. As opposed to whistling, I suppose.
The “smart” TV has the best and most central sound system in the house and I fired it up and opened the Youtube app. I laboriously used the remote to enter “aimee mann lost in space full” and by that point it found her full album – two versions, in fact. One had 11 tracks and the other had 12.
Thinking it was a bonus song, I started up the 12 track version and started on my work around the house.
I had to keep coming back after each song to skip the ads and I was in the kitchen when another one came on. I was washing dishes and didn’t want to bother drying off my hands and going back to the living room to push the skip button. I figured it would end soon enough and get back to the music, but it didn’t. After a couple of minutes, I went to investigate this long ad.
But, it wasn’t an ad. It was a track in the play list. The graphic was an animated sheet of music and the title was “Unreleased”. Instead of music, it was a voice speaking.
The voice was clearly AI. The script was also clearly AI generated. And the topic was, unfortunately, all about the virtues of crypto currency.
The track was 57 minutes long.
I picked up the remote and worked my way back to the menu. In and among the tracks of Aimee Mann’s “Lost in Space” album was this AI slop. I skipped past it and the album resumed – with ordinary commercials in between the songs as expected.
Later on, I looked up this tracklist on my computer’s youtube account and found the owner. All of their “full album” versions had this garbage track inserted somewhere.
This person – if it’s even a person and not a bot – played on the idea that some people like to listen to a whole album by an artist they like. They pulled all the tracks together and then inserted this “Unreleased” track as a tease.
It has 6.3 million views.
This is why we can’t have nice things.