Dustin Ballard

My day job is as an advertising creative director.

But the purpose of the channel is to ruin music, or as I say, to lovingly destroy your favorite songs.

And AI is one of the tools that I often use to do that.

So for example, here is my cover of the 50 Cent song, In Da Club, as performed by an AI version of country music legend Conway Twitty.

So how did I create that song?

The band you heard is actually a real band.

In fact, that's me playing the fiddle.

There's just one extra step in the process where I ran my vocals, my impersonation of Conway Twitty, through a custom AI voice model trained on his voice.

So to give you another example, along with a peek behind the curtain, in this next clip, you'll hear my actual voice, followed by the post-AI version.

Now, the David Bowie blues song I played for you in the beginning, that was actually created in a totally different way.

That was 100% AI from a text prompt, which to me is a little more unnerving.

In fact, when I first generated that song, it kind of messed with my head a little, because I love old music, I perform music from that era, and to hear the pain in that man's voice

who never existed, something about that just felt a little wrong to me.

And that's why I lied to you guys up front.

I suspect that some of you may have enjoyed that song up until the point you found out it was AI.

And to me, that would imply that maybe there's more to music than the music.

So is music melody and rhythm and chords?

Or is music expression?

And to a listener, does it always matter?

If I hear a song I love on the radio, am I going to stop everything and research how that song was created?