The true horror of how entirely AI-saturated our world has become was revealed to me earlier this month, when I was driving in the car with my mother-in-law. She had a new favorite singer she’s discovered on YouTube. She’d watched footage of this singer playing live concerts in large venues and wanted to know whether I could find her tickets to a gig. But to my confusion, more than 20 minutes of searching online brought up nothing in the way of a live event, though I have seen the videos myself.

It took a little while longer before I understood the truth: this popular singer had never actually performed any of her famous “live concerts” and, moreover, she had never actually been alive in any sense because she was a completely AI-generated performer.

My mother-in-law is not alone in being taken in. There’s a whole pantheon of entirely AI singers out there. One of the most popular is Eddie Dalton, an AI-generated blues musician who has racked up more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify. Eddie’s headshot suggests him to be a handsome, weary-looking middle-aged African-American singer, stylish in an old-fashioned way. The sort of man who’d wear a hat to church.

It turns out that Eddie Dalton is, in fact, only one year old: a soul singer with no soul at all

It turns out that Eddie Dalton is, in fact, only one year old: a soul singer with no soul at all

But it turns out Dalton is, in fact, only one year old: a soul singer with no soul at all. His most popular track, “Another Day Old,” has been played seven million times on the platform, and I personally could not tell much of a difference between “his” music and anything else you’d hear in a New Jersey dive bar. And unless they’re all bots themselves, most of Dalton’s fans still seem to be in the dark about his real age and status. Here’s a selection of comments under “Another Day Old”: “I’m 70… and this song speaks loudly to me! I thank God that I am still a purposeful piece in His magnificent design!”; “I really love this brother song them really made my day keep on singing brother God bless you thanks much appreciated”; “I love it, I’m 73 and having some issues, but the song picks me up, life is short and beautiful.” And it goes on.

In a piece about Eddie Dalton, the Washington Times said that he “is believed to be the work of Dallas Little, of Crusty Records, a content creator based........

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