An online troll who uploaded a huge stash of Homer Simpson songs onto music-sharing platform Soulseek has promised that even more AI cover versions are on their way—adding that it will soon be more difficult than ever to avoid them.
The internet prankster, known only as “Mr. Daniels,” laughed off criticism that he’s ruined “web 1.0 utopianism” by flooding the peer-to-peer program with thousands of beloved tracks that have had their original vocals replaced by the sound of Homer Simpson rapping, singing, and screaming. The 25-year-old said the stunt was inspired by Soulja Boy, who used to deliberately mislabel his songs to trick people into downloading them from LimeWire.
Mr. Daniels programmed a digital Homer to “cover” all 2,000 songs in his music library—including “Simon Says” by Pharoahe Monch, who shared the new version on Instagram with the caption: “Please leave me alone and leave me out of this!” Well, it’s too late for that, mate.
A kind of Rickroller for the AI age, Mr. Daniels has left the metadata on all of his files unchanged, so it’s impossible to tell they’re fake until you download and listen to them.
Since VICE revealed the existence of the Homer tapes, more than 35,800 people have tuned into Mr. Daniels’s online radio station, D’oh FM, and he’s been sent hundreds of requests for new “covers.”
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A Potentially Infinite Number of AI Homer Simpson ‘Cover Songs’ Have ‘Poisoned’ Soulseek
Mr. Daniels, who lives in England and has his own consultancy firm, has offered to help any musicians who want to use AI Homer covers of their own songs to fight back against illegal downloaders.
His stunt has received coverage not just from VICE but the NME, Mixmag, Resident Advisor, Gizmodo, and PC Gamer. But not everyone has seen the funny side of it. We decided to put some of the criticisms we’ve seen to Mr. Daniels.
VICE: So I’ve gone through the comments on Instagram and people are pretty angry. There’s one comment that just says “death penalty to him.”
Mr. Daniels: Grow up and threaten to kill me properly.
OK, what about this—“someone using AI to ruin one of the last bastions of web 1.0 utopianism as a joke says everything you need to know about contemporary times?”
If you think this, you don’t know how Soulseek works. Someone is going to download a song, realize it’s Homer, giggle, and then move on to the next download.
“Open source and free for all is the beauty of a networked world, where will we be if everything is rented to us via subscription? Those who own the products will own us. It’s sad to see freely-shared, freely-hosted sites damaged by tasteless pranks.”
I do think that everyone should have free access to every piece of media and be able to own it in their own computer forever without paying any subscriptions. I just also think Homer Simpson should be involved in some way.
And how about the suggestion that this is a “major label inside job?”
This one is true, so I don’t know how to respond to be honest. It’s hard to say no to cheques that big.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with Soulseek, can you tell them what you’ve done here?
Soulseek is basically pirating music directly from someone else’s computer. I put my songs on there and lots of people were downloading them. Once it got to a couple thousand downloads, I was like, “Hang on, there’s room to do something funny here,” because it’s not like streaming. You don’t actually know what you’ve downloaded until you’re listening to it.
I’m big into the AI voice-swapping community so I’ve got all of these tools set up for doing vocal extraction and voice conversion. I thought it would be a good laugh to take all of the vocals out of the songs and change it into Homer Simpson and then re-upload them.
Because it is just the vocals, you could listen to the first 30 seconds or the whole intro of some songs and not notice that it’s changed at all—until suddenly, there’s Homer.
It would still be immensely frustrating to get the entire Steely Dan back catalog and find out it’s all just Homer.
Yeah, exactly, that’s the goal. It’s allegedly how Soulja Boy got famous. He would put his music on LimeWire and call it 50 Cent “In Da Club” but actually it would just be “Crank That.” So people would end up accidentally downloading the songs.
How long did it take to do this? Did you have to do each song individually?
In the past you had Cassette Boy, who used to take little tiny clips from everything and pop them together to make songs, or vocaloids like Hatsune Miku where you have to actually play the music and then rearrange it bit by bit to make the sounds.
Now, if somebody wanted to do this themselves, there’s lots and lots of different Homer Simpson voice converters you can use. Obviously I’m a little bit cooler than that, so I would never use a website to do it. I use a technology called retrieval-based voice conversion (RVC) which runs on my little gaming computer and kind of does it all in batch. That’s the only correct way to do it for a big project like this.
“I went viral once for a video of Queen Elizabeth II”
Some have suggested that if you used certain tools, you could pollute Soulseek with a potentially infinite number of AI Homer songs. Is that true and are you thinking about doing it?
I have certainly thought about fully automating it all, and given all the hype I might put up a “Homerized” website to let people get to it themselves easily.
Have you noticed anything interesting about the music itself?
To be honest, just how listenable it is. Because it was my music library that I converted, I’m bound to like most of the songs, but because most of it is electronic music there’s not an insane amount of vocals anyway, it will just be Homer suddenly saying, “Limb by limb / we a-go cut dem dung.”
I made a little radio station and I pop it on sometimes and I’m surprised by how long I actually keep it on for, because it’s not annoying. We’ve got a lot of reggaeton. There’s some Brazilian phonk in there. Drum and bass and more hardcore stuff. It’s a very eclectic mix.
Homer’s a pretty versatile MC, then. He’s wasted at the nuclear power plant.
He can do it all. This is just another one of his many, many jobs. You can just imagine it as a Simpsons episode with Homer covering all the songs.
How did you get into the AI voice-swapping stuff?
I used to make deep fakes of politicians saying things. I went viral once for a video of Queen Elizabeth II. But I’m also doing a PhD right now looking at it from the detection angle because a lot of these technologies are going to be used for scamming people, like you’re going to get someone on the phone that sounds like it’s your neighbor or your son. One [scam] they’re doing in call centers is called accent elimination. It’s literally some call center in Indonesia or India or wherever, but they’ll sound like they’re from Yorkshire.
It’s a spooky time to be living in. We can’t rely on someone making a detector model because then the game is no longer to trick the person, but to trick the model. So I’m big into the research behind all of that, but I also just can’t say no to doing something funny if [the opportunity] emerges.
It’s a good way to prove your point.
You’ve also got all the AI copyright stuff going on right now as well. You’ll get the odd person who’ll only download Spongebob Squarewave songs, but others are clearly bot accounts who will just scrape the entire repository of songs. There’s no reason to do that unless you’re either a data hoarder trying to get all of the information possible, or you’re training AI models.
Soulseek is one of the best places for getting high quality FLAC audio, which a lot of current song-generation models aren’t trained on. You can almost always tell it’s an AI song if it’s low bitrate. So one of the things they are looking for right now is more high quality audio. I think it’s funny that some people might be training their models on these shitty Homer remixes.
Does this mean we could see a greater Homer Simpson influence on popular music in years to come?
I would hope so. That would be fun. There are ways of filtering that out at a mass level, but you’d have to know it’s happening.
Any plans to do Marge next?
No, you have to know where to stop.
The post We Got Him: The Troll Corrupting Soulseek With ‘Potentially Infinite’ AI Homer Simpson Songs Slams His Haters appeared first on VICE.
