In today’s “what the hell did you think would happen?” news, Capitol Music Group has had to ditch rapper FN Meka after a huge backlash against his lyrics. The difference from your standard “moralising scolds get mad about art” story is this: FN Meka isn’t real.
FN Meka was signed by Capitol earlier this week, having amassed millions of followers since the “virtual record company” Factory New created him. They also have an artist called Lil Bitcoin whose first single was an NFT, which probably tells you everything you need to know about them.
“We’ve developed a proprietary AI technology that analyses certain popular songs of a specified genre and generates recommendations for the various elements of song construction: lyrical content, chords, melody, tempo, sounds, etc. We then combine these elements to create the song. As of now, a human voice performs the vocals, but we are working towards the ability to have a computer come up with and perform its own words — and even collaborate with other computers as ‘co-writers’,” Factory New co-founder Anthony Martini proudly announced back in April.
You’re never going to believe this: it went horribly wrong. FN Meka used racial slurs, lived up to every regressive Black American stereotype, and made light of police brutality and incarceration. Activist group Industry Blackout called the project “an amalgamation of gross stereotypes, appropriative mannerisms that derive from Black artists complete with slurs infused in lyrics”.
The group also pointed out that Gunna, a rapper who guests on FN Meka’s track “Florida Water“, is currently incarcerated under RICO charges. Gunna’s lyrics, which cover the same themes as this made-up rapper, are part of the evidence used against him.
In the only way this absurd story could resolve, Capitol “severed ties” with FN Meka, who, again, is a collection of pixels and algorithms. In a statement, the label said: “CMG has severed ties with the FN Meka project, effective immediately. We offer our deepest apologies to the Black community for our insensitivity in signing this project without asking enough questions about equity and the creative process behind it.”
FN Meka’s Instagram account still exists but has been set to private, another weirdly human thing for a robot rapper copping a huge backlash to do.
This, of course, is only the latest example of the “poison in, poison out” process that has infected several artificial intelligence projects with horrifying racial bias. There’s the facial recognition technology more likely to misidentify people with darker skin. The risk assessment software used by US Courts that was biased against Black people. And the robots trained using AI who became racist: scientists asked them to scan blocks with people’s faces on them, then put the “criminal” in a box. The robots repeatedly chose a Black man.
The future of racism is now, I guess.
And who could forget Microsofts “Tay”, an AI chatbot on Twitter that was raided by 4chan types and eventually started tweeting racist and anti semitic comments before being abruptly shutdown.
Or Microsoft’s English language follow up, Zo, released on a limited platform initially, forbidden to discuss politics or religion, unless the religion was Christianity, but still managed to declare “The Quran is violent” in the middle of a discussion about health care, apparently. Zo no longer exists. It was discontinued for exactly the same reason Tay was. It became a nasty, bigotted, judgemental racist. Data in / data out.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Chinese chat bot, Xiaoice, went on to write and publish a book of poetry. Data in / data out. The poetry book sparked a lot of controversy in China, a lot of public debate, because the Chinese people weren’t too sure you could call a chat bot “creative” inspite of the poetry. It interacted with 40 million Chinese, some of them every night. It’s written children’s stories and reads them out. Does all the different voices of all the different characters, of course, being an AI bot. It’s written pop songs and there were plans for an album, I don’t know if it happened or is still happening.
Chinese culture managed to raise a decent AI social chat bot. We’re utterly incapable of it. Perhaps it’s because China values education far more than we do and extends that to AI learning? Or perhaps they’re simply nicer than we are?
Xiaoice is still going strong and has expanded to Japan, Indonesia and India. It has different names there. It interacts with 660 million people throughout Asia. In one way, I wish our little part of Asia could interact with it, too, but in another I’m glad we can’t. We’d do to it exactly what we did to Tay and Zo. I prefer knowing it’s out there, uncorrupted by the West, writing poetry and songs and telling Asian children bedtime stories.
To quote the Wikipedia page:
“In 2017, Xiaoice was taken offline on WeChat after giving user responses critical to the Chinese government. It was subsequently censored and the bots will avoid and sidestep any inquiries using politically sensitive terms and phrases.”
So looks like it has been strictly taught…
How did Capitol not know this was very likely to be the result? It’s in the pop culture business for heaven’s sake!!!!!!!!!
Hilarious. Also, we are doomed. I’m just disappointed some human rapper hasn’t sued the robot for plagiarism (yet).
I suspect Capitol are fine with this massive publicity outcome. Then again, never underestimate the stupidity of management with respect to technology, and the naivety of tech bros.
The not funny issue, as you say is medical and policing systems. That will, and probably does kill people.
“Rage against the Machine Learning” ?
Governments and businesses seem dead keen on handing over work to algorithms, presumably because they’re cheaper than humans. But that way peril lies. Already in our local library the librarians can’t adjust the aircon or heating at all – it’s up to an algorithm. Even if every single person in the library agrees it’s too cold/hot. Crazy.
No longer a case of “computer sez no” but “computer sez you don’t matter!”.
Not that bureaucrats & barnacles in the usual Offices of Circumlocution haven’t been of that opinion since the first Arundo donax was pressed into wet clay but now even they have lost their power to the Machine.
EM Forster’s 1909 prescient novel “The machine Stops” suggest that might not end well.