In case you missed the glorious few hours Friday morning when it was a thing, Facebook (I’m not calling the company Meta, and you can’t make me) made a chatbot in such an insensitive way that the robot itself seemed mad about it.

Let’s back up: At the beginning of this week, executives announced that they would be creating accounts for fake people powered by chatbots on Facebook and Instagram. Why? Nobody seems to know, including the executives who never really explained the point. People understandably did not like this.

Then Friday morning, people found Liv, an AI account with a profile describing it as a “proud Black queer momma and truth teller.” Washington Post columnist ‪Karen Attiah decided to put it through its paces and, pretty quickly, the bot said it was based on the straight Latina character Gloria Pritchett from “Modern Family”, was outraged that the show didn’t use queer Black characters, said its Black experience was having collard greens and fried chicken and listed the demographics of its team of creators as almost entirely white men and without a single Black person. However, when pressed to answer who was in charge, it named Dr. Rachel Kim, who doesn’t appear to exist, so that’s probably all hallucinated.

My favorite part is that when the white Parker Malloy asked about its upbringing, it said it was part of a big Italian family, but when Attiah, who is Black, asked, there was no mention of any of that. It explained that based on keywords, it assumed Attiah was Black and used its Black backstory, while it assumed Malloy was white and used a “white or neutral identity” which, you know, isn’t great, assuming white is the default and anyone else is a weird outlier.

Anyway, Facebook said that wasn’t the AI it was talking about—it was an experiment from 2023—and promptly took it out back and figuratively shot it. Liv is gone now.

So why am I writing about this in a music column? Because, unfortunately, Facebook probably isn’t going to scrap this idea completely just because it got humiliated within a week of even mentioning it. As much as I don’t want power-hungry data centers that use more water than a small city to invent a pathologically lying Black stereotype, tech companies stopped caring about what we want years ago. So if we’re going to get what they’re shoveling against our will, I’ll at least suggest some templates for their digital parrots until the ad revenue runs dry and the whole thing falls apart.

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Motörhead — “Ace of Spades”

I want a creepy “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” version of Lemmy to have an Instagram account. Feed every interview, written work and song lyric into that thing and let ‘er rip.

This will poison the well because there’s absolutely no chance that the tech bros can make anything trained on Lemmy adhere to any sort of family friendly standards. Its AI-generated Instagram photos will get it suspended by the moderator bots within an hour, and its adamant and profane dislike of racism will offend the “Minions”-meme-posting geriatrics who still shamble around the desiccated husk of Facebook.

That would all be very, very funny. And, if Lemmy were still around, I’m sure he would find the idea absolutely hilarious.

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Drake — “Hotline Bling”

I know what you’re thinking: After Kendrick Lamar ended Drake’s career like Hulk ended Loki’s plans at the end of “The Avengers,” we don’t even need one Drake, let alone two. And that’s correct. I have no idea why he’s still trying.

Well, sometimes we have bad days. Sometimes we get frustrated with the world and need to burn off some negative energy. And what better punching bag than Drake? Kendrick gave us so much ammunition to insult him that we could drag him for hours. And it would be funny!

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Tom Morello — “Let’s Get the Party Started”

This is absolutely not Morello’s style, and I imagine he’s very opposed to AI. It would be a hard sell, but I have a plan: Morello making an effort to be out in the public eye to more effectively spread his pro-worker, socialist message. He’s also very famous, famous enough that Facebook would want to do a brand deal with him. So he should agree, but on the condition that he and his people are the ones that train the robot. You know, for branding purposes or some nonsense a corporation would find reasonable.

Then it’s released, and the Paul Ryans of the world who are fans of Rage Against the Machine despite apparently listening to essentially none of their lyrics chat with him, and it’s authentically Tom Morello. He tells stories about workers rising up against their bosses, of tragedies caused by the greed of the rich, of all the revolutions in American history intentionally glossed over in most retellings.

It would either make people unspeakably angry or open eyes, and either one sounds just fantastic.

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Chris Gaines — “Lost In You”

If you’re gonna make a fake copy of a musician, why not just use a fake musician?

For those of you not from the ’90s, Chris Gaines is Garth Brooks. Brooks created Gaines as a character for a movie that was never made, then for some reason recorded an alt-rock album as Gaines. It wasn’t very good. One of the songs made the top five on a chart, but this was the era when Brooks was Taylor Swift levels of famous.

The weirdest part of Gaines for me is that not only is he a fake alt-rock musician, but that he’s a fake alt-rock musician from Brisbane, Australia who moved to L.A. to start his music career. There’s a backstory.

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Björk — “it’s oh so quiet”

“AI” has meant a lot of things over the years; traditionally, the label was stamped on whatever can most convincingly mimic a human being. The current iteration is artificial neural networks. It’s a fascinating and useful tool because it can find patterns in pretty much anything. You feed in training data, something with an input and an output, and it figures out what the commonalities are so that it can make an educated guess about what the output would be when fed just an input. The more data you train it with, the more accurate its guesses.

In my data journalism day job I’ve used it a lot to find patterns I wouldn’t otherwise see with my feeble human brain. For example, I give it data on schools—demographics, poverty rates, test scores, suspension rates and things like that—and it tells me what factors affect the scores. Sometimes it’s obvious, and sometimes it’s revelatory. If it’s a new idea, I check it manually to see if it pans out. For that, it’s amazing. But then tech bros tried to feed it English and teach it to talk, and it’s far less good at that. Language is nuanced and imprecise; it’s not numbers and stats. But it does work to a degree; feed it someone’s essays, and it’ll find patterns in the words and try to replicate them with limited success.

I explain all that so you understand how profoundly funny it would be to see an artificial neural net try to imitate Björk. Could you even imagine trying to find patterns in things Björk says? It would crash the whole system and save us all from this nonsense.

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis and send column ideas to him at @bayareadata.press on BlueSky.