Rick Beato, YouTube music guru and producer, created an AI singer called Sadie Winters in about five minutes, complete with song and voice and lyrics, on the Suno AI platform. He did it to make a point about the music business and the coming wave of AI within it.
It’s a pretty good song in the “breathy young woman singer” mode, called “Walking Away.” A video was made, the character of Sadie is a soulful looking brunette with bangs and angst. It went viral, of course, and now there’s already a half a dozen more Sadie songs and videos on YouTube. On one of them there’s a bio, which reads like a real bio, as if Sadie is an actual person. It’s detailed and believable. It even includes Rick Beato in the story. If you came into this whole thing sideways and unaware, you could think Sadie was an actual singer who’s face had just been digitized a bit to enhance the videos.
Sadie Winters, Walking Away, YouTube link
Sadie is, in the words of Randy Newman, a real emotional girl. Women would want her as a friend, guys as a girlfriend. Sporting a PJ Harvey look, she has an irresistible vulnerability that hints at a core of strength, where she’s wise to the world, guarded, will survive her traumas and along the way she’ll never submerge her emotions.
And she’s not real, not real, not real. What I just said sounds like she’s real, doesn’t it? Nothing is real, John Lennon said. Now nothing truly is real - that is, something made from nothing is real.
Sadie is an algorithmic computational confabulation from a system of devices called AI, but I believe AI, artificial intelligence, is an incorrect phrase. It’s here, it’s what we call this thing now, but what it is actually is AC, or advanced computation. It’s not intelligent. At least for now, it isn’t. Intelligence indicates the ability to discover something. These advanced computational devices can only repeat what’s already been discovered, and play with that endlessly. There will never be a computation that creates another “Yesterday,” though there will be one able to create a facsimile of it. Facsimile means something that’s not real. An approximation of reality.
Like Sadie.
But that doesn’t matter now, because Sadie is a character in the minds of people. Like Romeo and Juliet, who also weren’t real, but who were birthed out of a creative, very intelligent human mind, not a device.
The onslaught of Sadies is about to begin. Strap in, hold tight to your own hard-won notion of reality. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.