Copyright The Boston Globe
The traditional melody of the Coventry Carol is a downcast dirge, as full of holiday cheer as you’d expect from a song about the state-sanctioned slaughter of children. I listened with horrified curiosity as the song played out. Who on earth had aligned those lyrics with this bubbly nothing of a tune? Not who, but what. In threads on Reddit, in comments on YouTube, and in the unsettled feeling that overtook me as the same voice sang “Deck the Halls” to another ersatz melody, I heard warning bells ringing. Was AI slop seeping into our holiday mixes? I asked the young barista about the music. She showed me a tablet playing a YouTube video that advertised several hours of “Best Christmas Music” and displayed clearly AI-generated images of rosy-cheeked children with differing quantities of fingers. The “Coventry Carol” monstrosity itself was credited to “Bell Bringers,” an artist about whom I could find absolutely no information anywhere online. My best guess: Someone fed a free or cheap AI music generator a handful of Christmas songs and lyrics, instructed it to create Christmassy songs using the Ariana-like voice, and posted them on YouTube, including titles and tags intended to put them in front of people who were already looking for holiday music. That “Coventry Carol,” which has since vanished from the Internet, was easy to clock as likely AI-generated because the song’s serious subject matter makes it an outlier in the holiday canon. However, as reporter Samantha Cole pointed out in an article in 404 Media published on Christmas Day last year, it’s not always so straightforward to find the tells. “If I put this on in the background while doing something else, I might not think anything of it,” she wrote about one YouTube playlist she suspected was composed of AI-generated carols, where the most obvious oddity surfaced when she heard the lyrics of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” sung to the tune of “Silent Night.” In a way, it’s almost too easy for the slop to sneak in. People expect to hear Christmas music around Christmas, and the AI tunesmiths are hoping that we won’t care what that music is as long as it sounds enough like our idea of Christmas music. That means sweet and hopeful melodies, sleigh bells jingling, and instrumentation that sounds more like Tin Pan Alley than tin cans, even if it’s entirely synthesized. Pass those and a word cloud of lyrics through an AI song generator, and you have a product with all the signifiers but none of the spirit of the holiday season. For years, streaming services like YouTube and Spotify have proffered playlists offering busy managers and harried hosts several hours’ worth of holiday tunes: musical Yule logs intended to exist in the background of shopping or socializing. Searching “Christmas music” on Spotify directed me to one playlist with over a million saves, featuring mostly the likes of Dean Martin and Andy Williams with some suspicious outliers mixed in; artists such as The Humbugs, Daniel and the Holly Jollies, and North Star Notesmiths. Those only have a few songs each to their names but over a million listens on most of them, and the same biography: “Covers of christmas[sic] classics, created by working artists and producers.” I listened to a few tracks by Daniel and the Holly Jollies, and the vocalist sounded convincingly like Justin Bieber. Sight unseen, I’d probably believe it if someone said it was actually the Canadian pop prince. But I noticed “Coventry Carol” because I grew up on Maddy Prior’s recording of it, and the people who noticed something strange likely listen to more Bieber than I do. “Does anyone know if Daniel and the Holly Jollies are a real band?” one Reddit user wrote in a post last year. “I feel like I’m being gaslit!” Granted, there’s no proof that Daniel and his Holly Jollies are AI. Sound-alike acts have been around since forever, and this might be a simple successor to the kind of “Various Artists” compilation that you might have picked up at Party City 20 years ago. But if you’re streaming holiday music and you hear something that’s just a bit, you know, off, pay attention to that feeling. The same thing that makes it easy for the sludge to sneak in also makes it hard for it to stick around — for the moment. On the whole, we expect to hear Christmas music around Christmas, but beyond that, we crave familiarity. You probably know most of the popular holiday songs, so if an AI bot plays fast and loose with “Rudolph” or “Jingle Bells,” as Bell Bringers did, you’ll probably catch it, as did one of Bell Bringers’s YouTube commenters: “No way to use this as a sing along! Weird melody!” However, as AI music technology becomes more sophisticated, it might get more difficult or even impossible for ordinary listeners to notice it. Last October, Universal Music Group released a Spanish-language version of Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” using a vocal stem recorded by Chilean-born singer Leyla Hoyle which was then put through a bespoke AI model based on Lee’s voice circa 1958. Though Lee, now 80, gave that recording her blessing, is it such a stretch to imagine similar technology being drafted to make Nat King Cole sing a swinging version of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” or some other song released several decades after his death? It might be too late to entirely halt the synthesized ensloppification of Christmas music. Unlike living musicians, AI models don’t demand a living wage, negotiate union contracts, or get sick, and that’s hard for commercial music C-suites to resist. But as a listener and consumer, you’re not without power. Buy music directly from artists; make your holiday party playlist without assistance from the algorithm; go out to experience live music made by humans, for humans. Because no matter what you believe, or how you celebrate the season, it’s about being together with those you love — and that’s something the AI can’t fake.
