A huge and peculiar catalog of edited songs is circulating on popular music-sharing platform Soulseek. Unbeknownst to the people busily downloading them, all of the tracks have had their original vocals stripped out and replaced with the dulcet tones of Homer Simpson.
People tend to use Soulseek to download rare, underground, and independent music directly from other users’ shared folders.
Videos by VICE
An as-yet-unidentified online prankster has used AI to recreate the yellow dad’s voice and then generate what currently appears to be well over 2,000 Homer “covers.” However, the track titles, artist names, and metadata for the entire collection is unchanged, so it’s impossible to tell that they aren’t the original songs before downloading and listening to them.
This means that music fans on the peer-to-peer program will have unwittingly wound up with a hard drive full of dubstep, dancehall, hip-hop, and musique concrète tracks with Homer singing, rapping, and grunting over the top. When you consider how this material might be used—at the pinnacle of a DJ set, say, or as part of a funeral or hook-up playlist—it becomes clear that the potential ramifications for mankind are enormous.
What’s more, the way that Soulseek works is that a user looking to share their music just “points” it at a folder, so anything that’s added is immediately available for people to download. If whoever’s behind this is using a scraper and automating production of the tracks, this could lead to an infinite number of Homer songs flooding Soulseek.
An online radio station called D’Oh FM has even been set up, where you can listen to a nonstop broadcast of AI Homer crooning and MCing, 24 hours a day.
And to be fair, Homer has a pretty good flow. At the time of writing, he is delivering a passionate rendition of “Simon Says” by Pharoahe Monch, desperately imploring those girls to “rub on your titties.”
Click below to hear AI Homer sing:
The radio station features an incredibly budget depiction of Homer with an animated waveform inside his open mouth. There are also donuts falling from the sky and a disclaimer reading, “this does not need to exist”—which, possibly, is true.
The website, which claims to be powered by Duff Beer and broadcasting live from Springfield, also lets you request songs for Homer to perform.
“You can listen to a nonstop broadcast of AI Homer MCing, 24 hours a day”
In certain corners of the internet, Homer is already synonymous with AI music thanks to videos from an animated “concert” where he “performs” tracks including Underworld’s “Born Slippy” and a particularly rousing version of “Starlight” by Muse.
There are a number of websites offering voice-conversion technology, where you can use filters to ape a wide range of popular animated characters such as Homer. However, the number of songs featured in this collection hints at the use of retrieval-based voice conversion by someone who has a bit more understanding of what they’re doing.
One of the funniest elements of this is that computer developers are known to set up bots to scrape data from Soulseek, which is then fed into the models used to generate AI music. This is because the developers prize the high-quality FLAC format that is readily available on the file-sharing network. If they can train their models to produce music using this superior source material, it won’t sound like it’s low bitrate, which tends to be a giveaway that a song has been made using AI.
However, in this case, it appears that AI models may have ended up being trained on the distinctive vocal stylings of AI Homer Simpson—a pretty amusing instance of data poisoning.
