The Robot Drunk-Driving Song Was Easy to Swallow
by Rax King
About a year ago AI picture generators that turned your headshot into a goth or an anime girl were still popular among people my age, and I scoffed at high school friends who fell for this endless plugging of bullshit into the bullshit generator. My stated objections were (and continue to be) on ethical grounds: this so-called “artificial intelligence” could do nothing without first ripping off the entire history of human knowledge for corporate profit, and if my work was going to be ripped off, I prefer that it at least not be for the benefit of Sam Altman. Beyond that, I find the dominating aesthetic of AI—its tendency to impose an uncannily smooth Instagram Face on people; its smarmy, purple and cliche-packed prose—to be corny.
Still, these gags were unmistakably popular. I have no quarrel with the popularity of any number of poppy, fluffy, or silly things, but I drew the line at the outright vacant, or so I believed. I swore (and continue to swear) not to use AI.
Then I surprised myself by falling madly in comedy love with “AI Generated song about drinking and driving,” a pseudo-country jam on YouTube about what a blast it is to drive drunk. “Let me see how many beers I can make disappear / I think the left lane is where I’ll go,” sings a voice that sounds like Toby Keith’s mowed through several layers of AutoTune. “Put the pedal to the metal / DUIs are pretty special / I just ran a family of four off the road.” It’s got all the minor-key pathos of a pop country ballad about the troops as Robot Toby Keith vamps, and croons, and mispronounces DUIs as “dee-yous”; and despite my antipathy towards AI it was, I’m embarrassed to admit, the funniest thing I’d seen all summer.
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