The brick I've been building with lately has been LeBron James parody covers. They've been inescapable on my Instagram feed (which means I'm about 2 weeks late to this).
Despite all of the fears about AI taking over modern content creation, and despite how well known & usable AI song generation tools are: most of these songs are written and sang by other human beings. It is remarkable.
The volume
The sheer volume of LeBron covers is borderline overwhelming.
The user @.ilyaugust has published ten by himself. And you can see from the stems, these aren't low-effort: he is making an active effort to layer the vocals. The meme only started two weeks ago, this a serious amount of output.
Outside of @.ilyaugust, you've got parodies of Promiscuous, Die With a Smile, Man in The Mirror, My Way, Ransom, Sugar, Save Your Tears, Luther, Love Yourself and probably a lot more. Someone took the original and added an R&B verse to it.
We've been worried that AI would beat humans in sheer scale alone: but despite the ease, availability & historical use of AI song generation tools, it has been humans running this LeBron parody game. The sheer quantity is inescapable.
It's also telling
The lack of AI is also telling of the current perceptions of the tech. While some feeds might be polluted with the stuff, I'd argue that the young tastemakers aren't particularly interested in it.
Don't get me wrong: getting AI to perform a cover of a song with a particular voice is still in vogue, even if it is nowhere near the heights of 2024 where practically every song had a cover by jschlatt or Plankton. In many ways, the end of that trend happened jschlatt took on his AI voice covers with his own rendition.
It hasn't disappeared: even during this current Bronmania1, you'll still hear videos containing AI LeBron singing Forever.
But the initial curiosity phase has now passed us. We've familiarised ourselves with what AI looks like, and the issues in the output are noticeable to people. While this is not universal across age groups (old people continue to have issues identifying it), the current generation is far more in-tune.
It is too soon to say what the future of AI content is. Clearly some people are seeing success with AI generated content, and some people can't escape it. But I suspect that, for a large part of the current generation, the content isn't in vogue, and they're not seeing it.
Bronmania is a constant enunciated by events, such as the current parody phase. âŠī¸
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