Meet The AI Rapper Beloved By The Far-Right - Part 1

0:00Why do the far right need to invent artists that play at their rallies? And what happens when an artist that is singing about immigration and the destruction of the country starts to slide into conversations with political parties and then gets paid by them? Well in this episode of the Drowning Sound podcast we overlap with quite a few of the themes of the podcast so far this year. This is an episode about AI, about consent, about division and above all I think it's about the issues that AI is posing in our society in terms of disinformation and division and also how it's doing that by using other people's work.

0:44before we meet the journalist behind an investigation who found out who the producer and video makers are behind the Danny Bones project. Here is Tommy Robinson aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon who if you're unaware, well I'm sorry for introducing you to him but he is a far-right character who has for many centuries it feels but it's actually only decades, stirred up division in the UK. He is someone who often gets retweeted by Elon Musk and his voice enters and introduces this project at a rally in the middle of central London in front of thousands of people.

1:32We are in a war of propaganda, a war against the establishment, and we have to use every resource we have a new character. Have you seen any of these AI characters that have come to fame? Have you seen any of them? You've been watching them? We've got a performance today by the Note Project. I think they're here even though they are AI. Are they here? Let's play this. Come on. Breaking news today. Far-right rapper Danny Bones is set to make an appearance at the Unite the Kingdom event in London. Danny Bones, the extremist rapper linked to the Node project, is rumored to be attending the rally.

2:12Danny Bones is a threat to democracy. Good. You made it. I will never give up on my country. Because this, this is England.

2:40Welcome to another episode of Drowning Sound Podcast. Today we're going to discuss AI, the far right, and copyright abuse, and various other topics which orbit all of those different things. This episode of Drowning Sound Podcast is brought to you in partnership with Cobars. At the end of this episode, my guests are going to help me pick some songs to go on a playlist about British pride. I think that's probably the right title for it. If you head to joininsound.org forward slash playlist, you can find that and a companion playlist for every episode of this podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Harriet and Effie.

3:14You two have been behind a deep investigation which has upset a couple of producers and video makers who have been making videos which people have seen at Toby Robinson rallies, which have gone viral online, which have partnered with some right wing political parties. They don't like to be called far right. And maybe we could begin by introducing yourselves. Yeah, so I'm Effie. I cover AI and tech at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, or TBIJ. We're a non-profit investigative newsroom, and we kind of cover what's going on when it comes to AI in terms of the here and now and the human stories, as opposed to, you know, what might happen in 10 years.

3:54And didn't expect to kind of be in this AI political far-right world that I've ended up in, but here we are today. And you've been doing an investigation which, because the way that the Bureau operates, partners with other media organisations, which, cue, guest two. Guest two. I'm Harriet Williamson. I am a reporter and commissioning editor at Novara Media. And I would be remiss not to mention my colleague Simon Childs, who also worked on the report with us. Sadly can't be here today. Yeah, and also there's not enough chairs. So thanks for coming in. And I guess with the reporting, like the term far right is mentioned in a few places.

4:35And from what I can tell, that seems to be what the two creators of Danny Bones are upset about. So could we begin by why you might use that term or why that might not be the right term in terms of your reporting? And I guess for anyone listening going, what does far right actually mean? Have you got a reasonable definition of what it is? It's a really good point to bring up. And it's, I think, I think people on what, like the mainstream media, quote unquote, not to use Danny Bones as phrasing here, but would describe as the far right is, they all reject the phrase far right. I think Rupert Lowe from Restore Britain would, well, actually, he's more of the belief that he doesn't really care what he's called and people can call him whatever they like.

5:18but people like the Ben Habibs of the world who have kind of splintered off from reform and they are to the right of reform, you might argue that's a definition of the far right. Ben Habib, who I once heard called the Tory party socialists. Really? Yeah, I'm sure he did. I think, I do find it interesting though that throughout this story, the common thread has always been an outright rejection of the term far right. almost that it's like that it's kind of meaningless and that like speaking the truth is is just deemed far right by us the woke the woke left as they'd say harriet have you got a definition of what far right might mean we're right of the tories right of reform i i find the hair splitting from the creators of the node project and danny bones a little bit of a distraction to be honest it's um if if you're further to the right on on issues like immigration than the tories and potentially reform i don't think you've got a leg to stand on in terms of whether it's far right hard right it's it's fairly extreme i would say because i think looking at some of the subject matter some of the lyrics they're anti-immigration they're talking about the borders being open like talking about britain not looking like it used to i think is one of the recurring themes like they use all of these like peaky blinders backdrops the ai videos and things so let's let's sort of tell some of the audience a little bit about what the project is so it's an ai persona which is a term which two years ago i don't think anyone have understood what that was it's a character almost like a video game character that's been created using ai who is a rapper um who is a white guy with very chunky cheekbones um who loves picking up a union jack whilst talking about England and picks up George Cross too sometimes.

7:11That seems to be interchangeable, which is interesting for a nationalist. I've tried not to listen to too much. One, because I don't want to ruin my YouTube algorithm because most of it's on YouTube. Most of the videos on the YouTube channel are more talking videos than music videos. There is one for Advanced UK, which we touched on a minute ago. We'll talk about it in a minute. And it seemed to me like a bit like in America they can only find Kid Rock to play at Trump rallies. I think Tommy Robinson's struggling to find artists to perform or anyone other than right set Fred to speak up for some of the topics they're talking about.

7:46So they've invented an artist that's gained 5 million plays on YouTube, half a million plays on Spotify, and on the other platforms we don't really know because there's not public data out there. Topped the iTunes chart, which you can do with about 50 sales in the right hour of the right day. and they have presented this as a new artist. Is it the second album about to be released already? It only existed since November. We gotta stand up, man. Stand the fuck up. We gotta stand up, man. Man the fuck up. The man got us ran with that plan, get a shot up.

8:35This line to the free won't shut up. Four countries, the greatest, united in one nation. Our history's amazing, so don't listen to them shaming. Yeah, them fools blind. Whoever's shit and always random. So I guess let's start with how you first came across the project. Like, where did this research begin? And what were your first thoughts when you first stumbled across it? Yeah, I mean, for me, it was actually not through the music of the Danny Bones persona or avatar. It was actually, I was just interested in, again, you know, tends to use the far right phrase, but like how the right have adopted and used AI much more readily and effectively in campaigning and messaging than the left.

9:18And I think that's really interesting. And, you know, especially the sort of chronically online right of Twitter. You know, I think Farage was kind of in a similar way to Trump, I suppose, like, you know, pioneers of like using. It's almost like they handed a playbook. Right, exactly. it's yeah so was actually looking more at restore because rupert lowe was like on the up but then the algorithm you know has has cast me as like okay she's and for anyone outside the uk restore um are a party which i guess are we've got reform who are to the right of the tory party and restore rupert lowe was a member of reform and became an mp for reform he was also previously the chairman of southampton football club which i always find quite weird yeah um he's a successful businessman i guess is how he'd probably describe himself um but he is someone who regularly is reposted by elon musk um he says a lot of like he was behind a unofficial um grooming gang inquiry because the government hadn't done a second or third i don't know how many the government have done now there's been a few um he was he did their own one which i don't think the results were any different to the previous government ones from what i can tell so yeah for anyone that didn't have the context for years hopefully that's because these are quite niche politicians no they are incredibly niche and if you weren't on twitter you might not you know the you know musk is is definitely sort of or you know the musk platform is is definitely contributes a lot to that kind of and i think did i just read that he just earned a hundred grand from twitter yeah so more than his mp's salary which he says you know he donates fair enough but will come from will come from him tweeting mass deportations.

11:01So anyways, I'm kind of in this bit of the Twitter algorithm. I come across Advance UK, which I'd heard of only through the fact that Ben Habib, who was the former co-deputy leader at Reform before splintering off and forming Advance, which is, I'd say, slightly more on the kind of Christian nationalist side and sort of very traditional, again, kind of anti-immigration party. and they were using AI in their kind of party launch video, which was this two minute long culture video, clearly synthetic AI generated walkthrough of like different parts of British and kind of like British Empire history, I suppose.

11:43A highly selective rendering of the history of Britain. Is this the one that's got Winston Churchill in it? Yeah. And like the Beatles walking Abbey Road and the Crusades and yeah. Yeah, exactly. The best bits type thing. I mean, from the Crusades to the Beatles, that's our... I noticed that on Danny Bones' channel, the Crusades are very much a recurring theme, aren't they? Yeah. So you saw this video and it was promoting, was it around the Gorton and Denton by-election? Was that when you first came across them? This was about a month before the Gorton and Denton stuff, but it had the Node Project logo at the end.

12:15And up until that point, we hadn't sort of seen Danny Bones, hadn't seen the Node Project, but I'd found it interesting that this relatively traditional party, like Ben Habib's a pretty old school guy, like was, you know, had this. Yeah, he doesn't seem like someone that would know how to fix his printer, does he? For sure. And I spoke to him about it and he was like really happy with the work that they did with the Node project. He wasn't, you know, I think he was just like quite blown away by the AI. But yeah, sort of fast forward a month, it was the Gorton and Denton by-election with, and Advanced UK had sort of, that was their first, and only actually by-election that they would sort of stand a candidate in.

12:59and the Node project, so the sort of collector, I suppose, behind the Danny Bones character, ended up making four videos for Advance UK in the run-up to that Y election. And did you find that they were paid about four grand, so like a grand a video? Yes, yeah. So, yeah, that's a good way of thinking about it, I suppose. A grand for each video, which were kind of short-form videos. videos. One was a kind of AI generated montage of Nick Buckley, the candidate. Another was a kind of dystopian Britain and a call to arms to vote in advance. If I remember right, I think they lost their deposit in that election as well, didn't they?

13:40I think they did particularly well. Harriet, how did you first come across it? It was when the Bureau of Investigative Journalism approached Navarra to collaborate on this investigation. We'd been covering the Gorton and Denton by-election fairly heavily. We are a small reader funded organization um i love your put one hour of your salary per month or per week yeah like it's a really nice way of thinking about how to support the media you like yes and it really seems to resonate with people as well so you know we have a small team and punch well above our weight in terms of the amount of content that we can produce and the people we can reach and the gorton and denton by-election had been quite important for us so to see this ai character Danny Bones who is not real he's a fictional musician he doesn't actually make any music he doesn't actually exist intervening in this by-election and spreading a strong political message and really coming out strongly against the green candidate Hannah Spencer who ultimately won because he was so angry and disgusted that she had run campaign adverts in other languages it just showed the way that this emerging and obviously very present now technology is being used to influence the political process not that advanced uk were even slightly successful in this and to be honest the node projects reach on social media was much lower than than it is now following our investigations which you know is another issue in and of itself yeah i wonder to what extent like there was a thing called sunset rubdown i think they were called or something like that the um ai band and i'm pretty sure most of the plays on spotify were people going well what does this AI music actually sound like which then triggers the algorithm which then plays it to more people and like do you remember sort of what scale Danny Bones was out then was it like 50 ,000 plays or something or was it a bit bigger than that?

15:28Yeah I think I mean yeah it came up a lot in the reporting in the kind of just after we like published the first piece was wow just how much he like he's been platform you know not just platform but yeah it it made it into the sort of the mainstream and and it made out of the Twitter algorithms, I suppose. And Danny Bones wasn't, or the Node project creators were loving it and they were lapping it up and they were, yeah, they sort of very successfully went along with this sort of like us versus them kind of mainstream media or woke left activist slash mainstream media takedown thing. And you guys should all kind of rally around us and support us and at that point um you know they were getting more views and they were getting more streams but they were also then you know using that kind of we're the small guys in this as a way to you know funnel people to their donations page on buy me a coffee funnel people to paid memberships on on on telegram and things like that merch and things yeah there's a whole range of merch now there's some some really questionable t-shirt designs the irony of it is of course that neither of us work for mainstream media organizations yeah i'm guessing like in terms of scale of company there's probably more people working on these ai projects like there's definitely more people working in advance uk than there probably is in your newsrooms and well maybe there was but like that's now folded so in terms of danny bones himself as the character i guess to describe him to a listening audience this is somebody who looks like they've stepped straight out of a of shane meadows 2006 this is england and he even one of the songs yes he rips off the title this is england for his most popular track this is Don't ask why, why I'm England, till I die Stick on the telly and they're telling me it's falling Country full of racists, fascists and they're marching The streets are saying that it's Britain, that we're mourning Benefits are ramping, the borders are opening Streets are barred, the prices are soaring Crime unreported, the crisis ignoring The rich getting richer, the poor getting started I'll paint you the picture, we're broken and distorted england the aesthetic in terms of his clothing and like the the surrounding vibe feels very very shane meadows um even though the content itself is quite an antithesis to the messaging if you even like watch that film it's it's like the two people behind the node project uh watch this is england thought it looked cool but like didn't take anything else away from it they didn't get the point of the film but they watched the tv series but didn't get to the point where the racists have their epiphanies it could have been that um but yeah danny bones has had and remember he's not real he's had a level of success that emerges some emerging artists will will never ever reach he's had more streams than most of the artists i work with really like he's what when last when i last looked he had 15 000 monthly listeners and like there's all sorts of artists i know that have like if it's not the month their album's out they're often at like five or six thousand these are artists that could play queen elizabeth hall or sell out um maybe even bricks and academy level artists yeah but sean danny bones can be projected on a screen outside parliament at a tommy robinson rally which is what i was about to to ask about so that came around the same time was that where he first picked up his audience around i don't think unite the kingdom rally with tommy robinson yeah i don't think that was a pivotal point i think he was like very much on the up by that point because that was quite a bit after our our first collaborative investigation came out i kind of see it in like three stages in terms of like danny bones's political trajectory i think yeah stage one was advance uk i think that kind of came up because advance approached them um they did it obviously yeah with to make success advance folded um i think when they then got the media traction i'm like i think some someone at tommy robinson's team would have would have would have approached them and that was in may so that was three months on um and at that point yeah very much on the up had a kind of fan base so to speak and people you know donating paying buying the merch so he had the brand kind of set and ready to go and he had i think he had his first album so he had slopaganda that had it's funny thinking about it but yeah slopaganda had just come out maybe that was peak peak danny bones and then from then i think he'd sort of or you know the creators i think by by playing a tommy Robinson Raleigh you've sort of set your position.

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21:12i mean maybe there is some radio stations that would be playing it but like it seems to me the algorithm on youtube in particular like unless they've been spending money to generate a lot of those five million plays like that's that's not easy to grow a youtube channel between november and now it's like 10 months um i think when i looked it was like 4.9 million plays this morning probably by the time this goes out would be over five million like that is really difficult to grow any channel to that size like there are some pretty big household names that aren't at those numbers in that period of time so it's like you know with navara like it's not easy to drive 50 60 70 000 views on videos and to keep the algorithm circulating stuff um like i know the numbers are not necessarily that indicative but if that's them playing to random people on youtube if your cousin is logging in to listen to i don't know moe's death or kneecap or something and then suddenly being played that and then watching videos about how our country's being destroyed by immigration within 15 minutes i know that we talk a lot about like this andrew tate pipeline but like that to me is the thing that's slightly alarming about this it's and how much more extreme is it going to get well the extremity of the danny bones content and its message and how angry some of it feels some of it's very much in this sort of uh this is england shane meadows style and then some of it feels more like it's part of a action hero cinematic universe um very video game inspired um that only feeds the algorithm and it's prioritized by the algorithm because it feels angry it feeds these impulses that we know the algorithm really prioritizes things like fear things like anger things like disgust hatred these are all emotions that the the algorithm wants to drive because more shocking content goes further um and it but in terms of the the danny bones early songs particularly this is england when you start listening to it lyrically and and even visually there's it takes a while to get into the if we're using the term far right stuff um some of the some of this is england like these are concerns that a lot of people would agree with and even from a left-wing perspective i'm like absolutely these are issues why are our high streets crumbling why are all these shops boarded up why is there litter everywhere why are people working really hard and still not able to have a good and dignified quality of life the where it splits is where the node project through this made-up character of danny bones decides to blame immigration and as the videos go on it's there's a very strong anti-muslim and islamophobic focus it's the rupert murdoch and the cookie meme isn't it yeah i mean how old is that and it's it's aged yeah like fine wine unfortunately for a lot of people if anyone's never seen it it's rupert murdoch sitting at the table with two guys and he sat with cookies all behind him and he's talking to a white like working class guy i guess it's meant to be go and watch out mate that guy wants your cookie because the guy opposite doesn't have one and it's like that's like the ruling class is like they talk a lot about the establishment in their videos um and i think they use terms like mainstream media to make it seem as if media is some part of the establishment um i'm sure you get invited to the spectator summer party if you work at navara and you're like you've got a whatsapp group with members of um the labor groups and all those kinds of things like that that to me is where maybe where the establishment is yeah that's that's not yeah the circles that navarro is thinking maybe wasn't deadpan enough right for the sarcasm yeah i just the irony of the node project really thinking that we're part of the mainstream media when we like are very very divergent from them on a lot of issues and on almost every issue and we stand in complete opposition to them in terms of our funding model in terms of our politics, in terms of being able to call a genocide in Gaza a genocide, like we couldn't be more different.

25:26And I think it wouldn't take much of people looking at your reporting to see on a lot of the issues, the class consciousness, the kind of the reasons why we're in the economic mess that we're in, the reasons for those problems. Like I think I've seen Zoe Gardner even on being interviewed with you, like she's really good at explaining these problems are nothing to do with immigration like they might contribute a little bit but austerity has contributed loads extractive billionaires that take from both the planet and from people as much as they possibly can like businesses shouldn't be subsidized by food banks i think i can sit down with anyone on the far right and agree that that's how we should be thinking about the world but it's when they then point to the simplest reason for the problems, which I think is where an AI figure like this can do the work that maybe someone that gets a bit too in their head or is over-explaining, or I guess in the case of Nigel Farage and Richard Tyson people come from a very privileged background who are millionaires who are trying to suggest that they are the solution to the problems.

26:35And I guess when you start to come across characters like this it can play into a well what's the most basic version of this and i guess with ai as well you can look at um like with trial reels for instance on instagram if they keep putting out test versions to see what's going to resonate most they can get their message right to to be the right messenger to deliver it and with ai you can keep monitoring retention points and all these other things which if any of us had to sit down and keep re-recording videos like a human being would not necessarily be able to sit down and do that like i don't know whether that is the kind of thing they're doing but an avatar is going to be able to do that a lot quicker like if you scroll through your for you page on instagram some of the stuff that i'm seeing on there is avatars and they've just figured out like a successful video format yeah i think i think with the danny bones as well there are almost like four versions of his avatar to serve those different segments of his audience like there is the angry kind of reactionary guy sitting in his like pirate radio type studio where he like does react really quickly to something Sadiq Khan said often you know something that Keir Starmer was was talking about and you know dissatisfaction with them not going far enough on immigration um or you know something slightly more niche and you know um or you know a developing event like the um the Henry Novak case things like that where very quickly the character can have a take and not quite incite violence or anything like that but sort of you know and you can read between the lines and see what their what their sort of take was.

28:15They can find a tweet that's performing well and just put the words into the mouth of an avatar. Exactly it's it's an incredibly efficient and fast way of doing it and we're even. Probably quicker than setting up cameras and lights and microphones. Oh, God, yeah, and much, much cheaper. And then on the other side, you've got this, yeah, as Harriet said, like much more fantasy world kind of, you know, he's the character is dressed as a kind of vigilante type. Well, you know, it says Nodesk on his uniform and he's a mass deportation. He's a, yeah, it says mass deportation on the front and he is literally shown deporting people.

28:50And it's a sort of... There's nothing far right about that. Right. but of course it's yeah it's it's not far right um sorry i've got to remember that comedy is legal now so i keep forgetting that if i'm going to be sarcastic i need to like probably put a warning on screen because a lot of humor is doesn't seem to be cutting through when you make jokes about the far right i've noticed true no yeah but yeah i think both he can like inhabit sort of four or five worlds and also that like you know the there's the contradictions of okay he's a grime drill hip-hop rapper but also he can be a you know christian crusader and there are definitely you know comments from his from his fans or or just people who have come across him that that hate the kind of rap side of things but they love the christian context so he's feeding you know all all ends of his yeah strange unlike in the history of music where white men have taken from black culture and created successful music projects they they don't like it they like they'd much rather he was maybe making like more traditional british music which i don't even know what that would be if you don't bring all the other cultures which have gone into making the music we've got because i think like there's part of some of what i've heard that's like a bit more like jamie t and like that sort of um like not as rappy and like and then there's other bits which definitely they don't sound like the same voice at all because obviously it's an ai thing and they can just stick a voice in there um so we should probably talk about who it is the people behind this because that's been the most recent reporting you've both been doing um so can you tell us a little bit about um is it denver is that how you pronounce his name and yeah theo they are um i found their instagram accounts and um they are both guys with beards um and they both look like um they could have worked in a back room at the bbc when i worked there they're like reasonably cool looking guys from the very start of their instagram accounts by the looks of it um and they've been part of music scenes do you want to tell us a little bit about who they are or what you found out about who they are yeah i think from from you know reporting the first story it was always um the no project had said look we're staying anonymous we had sort of interact with them over email um strictly you know just sticking to email and not not on the phone or anything but there were and they like I will I will say to their credit I think both Denver and Theo Denver and Theo were very um very good at like covering their tracks and not not kind of um associating themselves with the node project or with Danny Bones until two things really um which which sort of linked linked Denver in particular to the node project one was when Danny Bones and the Node project launched their website with their merch page and their Shopify.

31:45The Shopify address linked to one of the companies, Denbam's company essentially. So that was one clue. And that's probably because of GDPR, he had to include the information on there, but probably didn't realize it was going to make a club. Exactly. And that version of the privacy policy has since been updated. I'm sure he realized the like the error there which is also like as a journalist or anyone that's online like figuring out how you might get doxxed is quite important and um like making sure that like when you register it's a domain name you can actually just look up who registered the domain unless they pay to keep it private yeah like there's loads of ways like companies house people's names and addresses and things isn't it's like lots of ways that you want to protect yourself and your privacy and things but yeah they Shopify is a like Canadian owned company and there's some reporting about the guy behind it backing right-wing politicians in Canada and it's quite an odd platform but Shopify is on so many websites especially in music to run kind of shops if people aren't using Bandcamp or some of the others like they're the default people go to and like an outsider music too obviously it's a huge platform yeah so yeah so you could see who it was through well that didn't a hundred you know that that got us some of the way to sort of this company that was um that you could put anyone's details i guess really right exactly so the other the other thing that was kind of the clincher was actually going back to the sort of advanced uk and finding out because we still didn't know you know what we did know from ben habib and from advance and from the node project that they had been paid x amount of money we didn't know how much we didn't know through who through through what and we got the expense returns from greater manchester council um and the expense returns for the four four thousand pounds for those videos at the time were also um sort of sent to to den bamba's company and for listeners that are not as in the weeds with this stuff like when you run for election you have to say where money's come from and where money's been spent and you know there's limits to what you can spend i can't remember what the limits are for like a by-election is it like 100 grand or something or is it i yeah i'd have to i'd have to check but no exactly in theory every and i don't think this is a rule that is followed religiously but you should put an invoice and expense for every single bit of sort of advertising etc and lo and behold that same company was on the list so i think at that point we were like right we've got our we've got our guy at least one of the guys and actually it was when we reached out to to denver he volunteered theo's name as the second guy so then we had the we had the full set and then you've got the information and it's like how do you decide whether it's in the public interest to reveal who it was behind it because i guess they are people with other careers and stuff and i guess when i looked into them after seeing their names and seeing some of the other artists they'd worked with looking through the artists they follow and artists that follow them like i had a few mutual friends with them and um which was to me like it seemed like denver's got like a few different instagram accounts and like i found his older one where he stopped posting a few years ago but lots of that had like production work he'd done with musicians that i think they would all be quite surprised to find he would be behind a project like this because a lot of them were artists from the grime and drill scene and um it wasn't exactly kind of like a white power kind of like nazi punk scene or anything like that he was making records that one extra were playing and things like that from what i could and same with theo like some of his videos music videos and things he'd made before his account becomes pure ai slop um there was stuff back in the early in his account again with like a lot of black artists from the uk that he seemed to be collaborating with and working with and may still be working with i don't know totally and i think yeah it's one of the questions we we wrestled with a lot but the moment we started interacting with denver as opposed to the node project they very quickly um the way they approached sort of this possible unmasking or you know naming of them was not saying yeah hands up it's ass type thing they said they said i mean i can get the exact thing but essentially the sort of gaslighting us and saying the fact that you think you've uncovered the creators of the node project is laughable um we are very and this is both on email and on twitter but saying you know almost implying it was an open secret amongst the node project fan base that like everyone actually knew who they were and that was you know something that was on record and they've tweeted they haven't deleted that so we were like okay it seems like you've got a reasonable um you know reasonable chance that at least some other people know that you're out there doesn't seem like yeah and again then they they kind of pushed it further and said we're not hiding behind danny bones we're not hiding behind the node project danny bones is the face of it because um because it's you know he's the face of the movement but like you know the artists we've worked with sure the movement which also isn't a movie sorry there's an air quotes for anyone listening there yeah yeah um and i think from my point of view like i came across the early reporting on this and i think the story originally i think went out with the daily mail was that right or did it start with navara and then the mail did something so with navara um as well and then the daily mail did a very good um good video on it that danny bones was confused by i think because at that point he was like oh it's the left woke media um onto me but then daily mail kind of threw him off um And I guess from my point of view, not necessarily the contents of the music, but the fact that there are people that work in the creative industries which are heavily using AI when the inputs of those systems is trained on other people's work.

37:45And you can put in other work from your hard drive into these systems as well to create new works. the videos are using imagery and likenesses of people that haven't given their consent to be in those videos which i think again is knowing who the people are behind it if you do have an issue with your work or your likeness being used you need to know who it is to speak to because these people are making thousands of pounds and like half a million spotify streams is probably about two grand minus the cut that spotify takes and the credit card companies with other people making money out of it and then with youtube five million streams like at most three grand for a million streams that's a decent chunk of money it really is and yeah for for us i think it was the monetization the reach and the political messaging all made it within very much within the public interest and this like new phenomenon of ai personas intervening in political events like important by-elections we should absolutely be digging into this so you started to dig in you found out who they are you've engaged with them like it feels like all the due diligence has been done um what i've been surprised by is i've seen obviously navara's reporting i've seen a few other places pick up on it but given the amount of coverage there is of ai given the amount of coverage there is of immigration and the right wing and all the other things in this country it didn't seem like a story which i mean i've read through the comments like people were generally stunned and shocked and i think people that have heard of this story are like what people are using ai to create a musician that's part of political campaigns and kind of rallies and those kinds of things what is it about a story like this that you think doesn't get through to that next level like doesn't turn into something which i don't know stuart lee writes a column about or the the news at 10 is doing as one of their news stories like what is it about a story like this is it the complexity of it or is it because the use of ai has also almost become quite normal already i i would push back on that slightly i think the first story was massively picked up And we were like, I was quite surprised at how much that reached, not just like mainstream like publications in the UK, but like I was getting calls from like Swedish TV and a lot of European outlets that were like very interested in whether, you know, a Danny Bones from Italy might pop up or a Danny Bones in Denmark or wherever.

40:20So I think, you know, publishing the sort of reveal of, hey, there's an AI character being paid by, you know, an AI character whose creators are being paid by a political organization really traveled and kind of got people thinking, you know, we've been concerned about AI and it's possible interaction or, you know, intervening in politics for a while now. and here's an actual example of it rather than a sort of hypothetical conversation. I think the reveal of the creators itself is a really good question. And I think because it's, I don't know, I'd be curious to hear what you guys think, but I guess it's a slightly different story because it's moving into a sort of like...

41:01Humanizing an AI. Yeah, I guess it's hitting a different audience and getting through to like, I guess what is a siloed algorithm of like, some people are really interested in the kind of political misinformation side others much more in the in the you know the music the copyright stuff and i think those audiences tend to be quite separate weirdly i'm the person in the middle yeah yeah um yeah i wonder if i guess maybe what i was thinking is i didn't see like enemy and a lot of the kind of places you'd expect the music coverage to be around because it's a music story in a way it's like the use of music in political campaigning but maybe maybe that's different maybe i'm misreading it you know what sean i can't speak to the poor commissioning decisions of other outlets i think they should all have picked up this story quite frankly um the establishment yeah mainstream media being i'm being silenced yeah frankly but you know going back to this issue of ai generated music it is becoming more and more common and apple music reckons that about a third of the songs on its platform are now a hundred percent ai generated which is a vast amount and that we know from research done by ipso and by deezer which is another streaming platform that people overwhelmingly want to have ai music clearly labeled so they know what they're listening to people are generally quite open to listening to ai music mostly out of curiosity i think but they want to know what it is they're actually consuming they want it to be clearly marked um and i think that that's that's really fair and i see generative AI within music as a form of quite serious creative theft because these models are entirely trained on existing human artistry that the humans behind it were not consulted about, they didn't give consent and they weren't compensated or remunerated in any way for this use of their work.

42:59let's pause this episode here and pick it up next week because we had a lot to talk about as you might be able to tell i was very curious about the process behind this and all the interconnected topics that a ai persona like this stirs up in the next part we will talk about consent, the use of black artists in this work. And I'll dive a little bit deeper into Spotify's response, the reactions from artists, and what's going to happen next with Danny Bones. Like, where does a project like this go? And what should or shouldn't the platforms be doing? And above all, what as music fans can we do to stop hundreds of these types of artists popping up in every election and across social media, taking up bandwidth from the music we love and generally being something which is likely to appear in your feed, unexpected and you might quite enjoy it and you might dive a little bit deeper and then suddenly you're finding that you've been led into a world that you would not usually find yourself.

44:08And yes, as a grown-up you might have the critical skills to figure out what's going on but if you're someone a lot younger someone a bit more impressionable you may discover weeks from now that the person that just heard a few songs they quite enjoyed they may find themselves in far right corners with fascist tendencies that they did not hold and i'm not saying that music is that brilliant at onboarding people like that but if we have to believe that on one side of things musicians speaking up for change can lead to change in the world then obviously we need to think about the fact that there's another side to the same coin so this has been the drowndon sound podcast hosted by me sean adams from drowndon sound and produced by georgia mooney i will put a playlist together from suggestions from harriet and effie all about british pride as part of our partnership with co-buzz and every week we make a companion playlist and this week is around the theme a British pride and they've picked tunes by The Clash, songs by Lily Allen, I think there's an Oasis tune in there, there's all sorts of things, songs that just for them made them think of the joy of being English slash British and the kind of music that we make on these aisles.

45:23You can find that playlist at dranninsound.org forward slash playlists and get yourself a 30-day free trial to which are the more ethical streaming platform who pay four times more than the other streaming platforms and they have human curators and our playlists each week are another form of human curation so that's dranninsound.org forward slash playlist to grab your free trial and to listen to the companion playlist for this week we will be back next week with part two of discovering who Danny Bones is or to put it a better way who's behind it why they're behind it what they might be hoping to achieve and why we should all take a moment to ponder the problematic nature of a character like this who is really just a icon of a lot of wider topics which I think many of us are very acutely aware of we'll get into all that next week bye for now Thank you.