What If A.I. Was One Of Us, And Made Slop Like None Of Us..? (a.k.a. The Ballad Of Jared Hutcherson)

 

I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about A.I. this winter, even though the encroaching of A.I. slop into all aspects of media life - hey, they even got to the cute animal videos! - is hard to ignore. If you didn't specifically search for A.I. slop for some reason, you weren't specifically exposed to it, if -, like me, your socialmedia presnce is *checks notes* zero. And yet the march of the sneaky robots continues ever on, whether I tookn specific note or not. There is a fabulous article from December called "The Sloppification Of Everything" by the ever-reliable Brian Phillips over at The Ringer that you should really check out. Phillips points out how fact and fiction are now less separatable than ever, how in the era of the deep fake in image, voice and moving pictures you can not just trust your own eyes or ears, as has been the inofficial measure for incredible things for centuries. 

That ear part became eerily prescient just a short bit later, when I didn't find A.I. sloppification, but A.I. sloppification found me. As ever, in disguise of course. For the homebrewed All Pearls, No Swine and Bluegrass Chartbusters series I am from time to time scouting Youtube for new hidden gems, or overseen track, and of course this is where the ghosts of A.I. past and present found me. Having racked up a good number of views on the 'Tube, on the sidebar its algorhythm of course presents me from time to time songs it might think I like. Sometimes they're right, often they're wrong like any algorhythm, but before - at least as far as I can tell which is, given the subject, not very - Youtube's algorhythm hadn't proposed an A.I.-created song to me, only to propose me two in the space of a couple of days. 

Enter Jared Hutcherson

Among the songs proposed, was a track called "Sunrise Sessions" by artist Jared Hutcherson. As usual I clicked on it. Oh, modern country music with a girl singer. Fine. Nothing worth getting excited about, but listenable. No identifying who the girl singer is though with or under the track. So I decide to see and swing by Discogs. No Jared Hutcherson listed there, which makes an awful lot of sense, because Jared Hutchinson doesn't exist. You can't find a picture of him if you tried. For someone who is a totally anonymous phantom, 'he' sure is busy, though, his Youtube discography counting no less than 30 studio albums, filled with between 17 and 21 songs each. That is a lot of music to create for a hard-working country musician, but an easy day at work for an Artificial Intelligence. As Phillips notes in one of his rules to identify, slop exists at scale. Jared Hutcherson slop definitely exists at scale. 

First, there's the music itself. Ultra clean digital sound sheen and absence of any personality in vocals and performance. I clicked on another Jared Hutcherson track, this time a male, young-ish voice, vaguely recalling the country-pop singers of yesteryear (and today? I haven't kept up with what comes out of Nashville). Okay, I thought, so I finally found the real Jared Hutcherson. Then I clicked on another Hutcherson track, and surprise, the man has just changed his voice. The young-ish pop voice is now a middle-aged grizzled Americana voice à la Colter Wall - that's weird. But only, of course, if you still considered that 'Jared Hutcherson' is some sort of real person, or even persona. 

Here's 'young poppy' Jared Hutcherson

And here, on the very next track, is 'middle-aged grizzled Americana vet' Jared Hutcherson

Whatever else 'Jared Hutcherson' is, he for sure is somewhat of a ventriloquist, sounding like at least two different people with completely different voices, and at least once - maybe as a weird nod to Prince's Camilla phase - also a girl, which was what got my attention in the first place. Maybe someone messed up labeling on sound files, and "Sunrise Sessions" was supposed to go with the totally real female country-pop singer Tyler Slow. His name is clearly chosen on purpose, generic enough to be plausible and pass muster and possibly also for easily confused listeners who like 'that Hutcherson guy' to confuse him with Jonathan Hutcherson, a real and existing country music singer.

Once the detective instincts of ol' OBG awakened, I couldn't help but be drawn back to the Jared Hutcherson mystery. Elementary, dear readers. Next clue: The album covers - all totally generic images, mostly computer-created, and not a single identifying or personal feature on them. One would think a guy with 30 albums under his belt would at some point show his mug on one of these, but if you don't have a mug to show...And of course it got worse: Whoever is behind the Jared Hutcherson project is also quite lazy. Two of the album covers for the different studio albums are the same generic sand dunes image, just colorgraded differently. Come on, man....uh, I mean bot...

Jared Hutcherson and his classic album Sway...

and Jared Hutcherson with, uh, his other classic album Sands Of Time...

(I mean, aren't they all classics..?!)

If the whole Jared Jutcherson saga teaches us anything, it's how utterly generic and hollow most modern country-pop is, if a computer can so easily mash up a thousand clichées and regurgitate them without anything seeming amiss, at least on a cursory listen. 'Jared Hutcherson' could easily make it into a radio or internet radio playlist without rasising any red flags, and that's maybe the scariest thought of it all. 

Having just discussed music streamers with my old college buddies (who are both streaming their music, and happily so), I sent them an article on how Spotify is freezing out real artists to pay their (miserable) royalties in favor of specially commissioned tracks that sound a bit like these, but are royalty-free, being paid with a lump sum by Spotify. That was, of course, a couple of years ago. It wasn't super-ethical, but at least it was still music made by real musicians, however badly paid, uninpired and uninspiring the results. A.I. has of course completely dusted that text and its concerns, because now, things are ven easier for Deezer and Spotify to lull you into total complacency with music that you probably like because the algorhythm tells them so: They can just pay a couple of guys to cook up hundreds of hours of music in mere days. What's real or not, on You Tube or in your Spotify or Deezer play list is becoming more and more difficult to discern. Then again, sign of the times. As Brian Phillips says, "real things seem a little bit fake. Fake things seem a little bit real."

Jared Hutcherson (artist illustration)

Here's the thing: I'm not a sworn enemy of A.I. I mean, professionally I am, because as a language teacher ChatGPt and its brethren are my worst enemies, because students only use it to cheat...and doing a bad job of it at that. But I can roll with A.I., notably for my weakest area in creating stuff for One Buck Records - the cover art. I have occasionally used A.I. images for that, though it really is a crapshoot and you rarely get what you were hoping for. But still, there's a place for it. As a matter of fact, the lead in picture above the article with the appropriately menacing robot (which I didn't choose as such, like I said, a crapshoot)  is, yes, A.I.-produced. But I don't use A.I. to fool anyone, or to present it as something it isn't. 

In this spirit you'll also find the OBG record of the day, which this time is an EP's worth of AI songs reimagining pop or rap songs as classic soul or blues records, an automated take on the 'unusual covers' subgenre' that occasionally amuses me, and is openly and proudly AI. As for the slopification of everything, keep your eyes and ears open, folks, even if that ain't what it once was anymore...

Disclaimer: All pictures in this article have been created by Artificial Intelligence. All words, however, are still by hot-blooded human OBG.