Fake, and dishonest, Christian Country Music.
I learned of this through Fil Henley, who just pointed out Ella Scott (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0wtyIljNns) which is an AI account with AI-generated songs and thumbnails being produced at an unfeasibly high rate for an actual human. There are astroturfing channels under other names that purport, with more AI fakery, to show themselves alongside Ella Scott. There's an Ella Scott psychology channel tapping into the self-help market. There's an Ella Scott Soulnotes channel. There are not-declared-AI linked accounts on other platforms. Until this all got high exposure, there was an active PayPal donation setup for a non-existent Ella Scott charity.
This isn't even the first firehose account of AI-generated CCM that M. Henley has covered. There has been the improbably double-barrelled James Hilton-Cowboy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HORuCSsDLI) for example.
And there is an audience of Christians being taken in by these thinking that they are real performers.
And besides, if they like the music, what’s the harm?
Ironically, the religious have rules about doing unto others: be sympathetic to the people conned into giving their money away, in the hopes that they'll be sympathetic to you when you're conned in your turn.
Makes me wish they'd start showing thumbs-down counts on videos again, maybe that would have some impact on the problem.
Take image generation trained on a bunch of copyrighted photographs and artwork. What is the intent behind creating such a tool?
Yes, there is a stage where the software developer is building the software to do this purely operating on a "this is a cool hack" kind of mentality, but the point at which you make it available to other people, especially for payment, is when the liability becomes real.
Having worked on open source software for most of my life, I have always had to be aware of the issues surrounding copyright. That other software developers will write software and use copyright to proect it while ignoring the copyrights of others is deeply concerning. Copyright of software is no more or less important than copyrights applied to images and artwork.
Engineers are liable for their mistakes. At some point the same mechanisms may well need to be applied to software.
Building FTTP networks is not expensive. It's the bullshit surrounding obtaining permission to install the fibre that is expensive.
That being said, some of the random still frames that make up these videos are pretty stupid and valueless.
But really, I’ve see this across so many genres lately.
I don’t know if Alphabet wants to solve this, though.
Typically, all these videos have under 1000 views. I am at a point where I might even write a user script to hide every video under 1000 views.
There appears to be an enormous algorithmic weight to those. Just a few such videos completely swamped my recommendations with Japanese marching bands a couple of years ago. Simply finding those two to copy their URLs into this post has immediately put two further band videos into my recommendations.