A couple of days ago a friend re-posted another's Bluesky post which linked to a song on YouTube. The song is obstenibly an Irish interpretation of Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis." The above image, which serves as the thumbnail for the video, suggested to me that I was going to hear two guys from Ireland. Realizing it was a still image and not a video, I listened to the song while doing something else. I even kind of liked the version more than the original Springsteen version, and I was just about to share it on Facebook when I noticed on the page's sidebar recommendations that there was a "France version," which I also clicked on and listened to for a few seconds.
That's when I noticed that there were even more versions, none of which I'm providing links for, only screenshots.
Along the way, I found another account which appears to be posting the same kind of slop.
And another.
And another.
As regards the first handful above, I did a web search to see if Ethan Gontar was an actual person. At the moment, I'm not sure I can say so for sure. I found a website as well as social media sites using that name, but "his" website looks very much like it could be AI-produced. If indeed Gontar is a real person, it seems that video production—not music—is his thing.
I found an interview with what initially appears to be a legitimate news site, but neither the interview nor any of the other stories I've clicked through to on the site have bylines. They're all attributed to Ldn-Post... all 22,624 of them, which suggests to me that the entire site is AI-generated. I mean... the opening paragraph:
Ethan Gontar is an Israel-based musician, composer, producer, and a singer-songwriter. We’ve been trusting that Ethan will enlighten us additional regarding his work strategies, what moves him, his opinion on thoughts, and whether he jumps at the chance to work alone or in a gathering for quite a while. We visited with Ethan for some time and got to hear some interesting things from him.
What reasonably intelligent journalist writes like this?!?
"We’ve been trusting that Ethan will enlighten us additional"?
"his opinion on thoughts"?
"jumps at the chance to work alone or in a gathering"?
So this is where we are. YouTube accounts which are full of artificially produced music, likely being mass-produced with very little effort, all for the purpose of monetizing off the music of others. And in the case of Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis", capitalizing on a highly emotional moment in time.
Currently, the "Irish Folk Version" has over 120 thousand views; the "Irish Female Duet" (which features a trio in the photo!) has over 57K views; the "Rock Version" has over 33K; the "Live Version" has over 16K. The other versions are in the thousands. Two more "covers" were added to the page today: What if "Here Comes The Sun" were an Irish folk song? and What If 'Yellow Submarine' Was a Country Song? While the view counts on those is rather low at the moment, no doubt thousands of Facebook users will be clicking on them and sharing them, completely unaware of what's going on.
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