AI Christmas music a soulless cash-in on holiday spirit

I want to give you a list of AI Christmas music to block in your major music streaming platform.

I don’t think it’s comprehensive. I bet there’s a bunch of new ones that I am still unwittingly playing. I just want to feel festive for a moment sometimes, which is why I play this music.

But now I know about artificial intelligence (AI) Christmas music, so I can’t be happy in December, either. AI sludge is already everywhere and now it’s here, too.

Some stupid list won’t be enough to solve the problem. To be honest, I don’t really know how to fix this. Banning AI Christmas “bands” who receive millions of listens monthly is like killing individual flies coming from a massive open sewer situated right around my house.

Well, Merry Christmas. Here is your gift. A little fly swat.

AI Christmas songs sound like the real deal. Nothing funny or remarkable about them — the occasional odd instrumentalisation or off-sounding vocal, but little that sparks curiosity and absolutely nothing that sparks joy. That’s generative AI’s job. It thieves from real stuff and shoves it all into a tech mulcher to produce a reasonable aggregate of all the things that ever made you feel something.

Now you can enjoy a tech-slop aggregate of those old feelings in your stupid Christmas hat. Like a digital mama bird that regurgitates your own nostalgia into your open beak for you to gulp up.

You’ll hear this shit whether you want to or not. It will come up on auto-play if you fire up a lone Nat King Cole song. It’s also infesting all the largest Christmas playlists on streaming platforms. Some of these AI Christmas “bands” have been around for a year or two by now, so they’ve accumulated enough streams and shares to come up in the playlist right after Mariah.

A popular bit of software used to make AI Christmas music is Suno. The app follows specific commands to create AI music and vocals accordingly. It also allows artists to hide the AI mulch behind a smattering of real lyrics, vocals and instrumentalisation they can choose to add.

All of these AI slop Christmas artists appear to be controlled by the same person or group. There are a few tells.

All their Spotify bios begin with a variant of the following statement:

‘[Insert band name here] are working songwriters, artists and musicians who have joined forces to release holiday-themed cover music on their independent record label, distributed by Warner Music’s ADA.’

Distribution services like ADA and Distrokid accept AI music but are getting increasingly picky about what they allow through the gate. Not because they have morals. They do not. It’s due to the many legal battles cropping up currently around AI thievery. The merest uncredited sample can bankrupt artists and minor labels, so imagine the kind of payday an entirely thieved AI musical salad could deliver.

As long as the content is deemed of high enough quality and perhaps spliced in Suno with real vocals or instrumentalisation to help disguise it, they’ll let it through.

Another tell: the bios of these “bands” tell you to follow them for more music. But you can’t. The Instagram and Twitter accounts are always locked.

They don’t really want people snooping around and verifying the AI-ness of the music. Or determining who is producing it.

Oh, well. Another bit of AI slop to have to gulp down whenever I turn one of my hundred bits of shitty tech on for the day. Another shitty facet of the minefield of behaviour modification, guerilla marketing and AI mulch that is my digital life.

Tech writer Ed Zitron was writing post-U.S. Election about this misery that is modern digital life:

It's time to accept that most people's digital life fucking sucks, as does the way we consume our information, and that there are people directly responsible. Be as angry as you want at Jeff Bezos... but don’t forget Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook and every single other tech executive that has allowed our digital experiences to become rotted out husks dominated by algorithms.

These companies are not bound by civic duty, or even a duty to their customers — they have made their monopolies, and they’ll do whatever keeps you trapped in them.

Funny how recently one of the modern era’s most effective political assassinations appears to have been, in part at least, inspired by the inhuman outputs of AI algorithms.

More or less across the political divide, we can all see people cheering the moment of the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. From that, I suspect we’re able to assess just how unhappy people really are about the encroachment of AI slop, AI thievery and AI-based decision-making into daily life, whether real or digital.

AI is here to stay, so get used to it

The consensus among experts and pundits on AI technologies such as ChatGPT seems to be that it’s like old age — inevitable, so get used to it.

I don’t think that our mainstream discourse has bothered to give people the tools to voice this frustration. Zitron has often written about this as well. Tech writers are too busy breathlessly playing stenographer for the lies of AI snake oil salesmen to address the fact that it’s not really helping anyone. Just one more update! Please! Just one more! You’ll all see!

Perhaps the worst thing that AI can do has already been mentioned. Is it the insurance stuff? Or is it Israel’s mass-murdering tech drone equipment?

I know it’s not AI Christmas music. There are greater evils in the world, yes. And I’m sure I’ll push on, drunk in December in my Santa hat. Perhaps in time, I’ll be willing to trade away yet more cynicism at an unending torrent of nostalgic AI mulch for just a little more cheer.

But, from my layperson calculations and looking at the average streams of each of these AI “artists”, I believe this “AI art” earns whoever’s behind it hundreds of thousands of dollars every Christmas season. And I don’t like that.

The list of AI Christmas music I've uncovered is as follows:

Sleighbelle;
The Humbugs;
Dean Snowfield (come on);
Snowdrift Sleighs;
Daniel & The Holly Jollies; and
North Star Notesmiths.

If we’re negotiating how to take a more moral position you probably shouldn’t even be paying for Spotify or Apple Music at all. But you probably do. And you probably do Christmas-y stuff in December, as well. So join me in simply selecting ‘Don’t like this artist’, or whatever similar function your streaming app offers.

Join me as we content ourselves with starving some arsehole of $0.00001 cents this Christmas. Happy holidays.

Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter @tom_tanuki.