“But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence?”
—Jean Beaudrillard, Simulations

You will inevitably hear some terrible covers of iconic songs if you hang around long enough at Place d’armes, the public square in front of Notre-Dame Basilica.

Take the busker who perpetually butchers Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” Another charlatan frequently makes a mockery of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. And then there are the worst offenders, those who dare to perform “Hallelujah,” a sacrilege bordering on blasphemy — before the Big Church, of all places, in Leonard Cohen’s hometown.

Doubtless, there are other artists who have paid proper tribute to this modern psalm: think of k.d. lang’s or Jeff Buckley’s or John Cale’s versions. But I would venture to guess that when Cohen composed “Hallelujah’s” ascending refrain, he was not envisioning a spectacularly subpar karaoke rendition belting out of a Peavey Rage amplifier, sung by some unshaven doofus in a bucket hat before Sunday Mass. For him, had he known, Dante would have reserved a special circle of Hell.

Still, I believe there are deeper depths to plumb, because I have now heard the generative A.I. version of “Hallelujah,” credited to “art_is_human_100,” available to stream on Suno.com.

Suno, Inc., the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Artificial Intelligence company, is the defendant in a lawsuit filed this week in Canadian Federal Court by the Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada, otherwise known as SOCAN. SOCAN is one of the main industry associations that represents Canadian cultural producers and ensures that they are credited and remunerated appropriately for the use of their works.

The lawsuit alleges that Suno has used untold SOCAN-represented songs — in addition to the entirety of recorded music available online — to train its algorithms to produce identical or near-identical versions of songs without ever obtaining permission or paying proper royalties.

Suno “has infringed and authorized the infringement of SOCAN’s Performing Rights,” according to the Statement of Claim, for which SOCAN is seeking $20,000 for each song Suno has reputedly ripped off, in addition to $10,000,000 in punitive and exemplary damages for Suno’s “knowing, high-handed, wilful, and malicious disregard” in violating artists’ rights.

In an addendum labelled “Appendix A,” the lawsuit lists 150 songs, including “A New Day Has Come” by Céline Dion, “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8ter Boi,” “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell, “Heaven” by Bryan Adams, Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me,” and the instrumental and acapella versions of Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” But there are many, many more, and SOCAN’s lawsuit cautions that Suno is “highly likely to infringe SOCAN’s Performing Rights” again in other works, not least of which, those that don’t yet exist. Effectively, SOCAN claims that Suno is stealing the music from unborn ears.

News of SOCAN’s legal action coincides with the widely reported postgame analysis of OpenAI’s rogue cyberattack on its rival company, Hugging Face, this past July. The details of this incident are the stuff of Science Fiction — rebel A.I. “agents” ostensibly conspiring, independent of their human programmers, to cheat on their tasks by looting data and even exhibiting signs of covering their tracks.

Numerous journalistic outlets referred to this event as a “warning shot” that should prompt extreme concern from everyone about the potential dangers of autonomous Artificial Intelligence. If malicious A.I. swarms can attack companies, they could conceivably do the same to infrastructure, governments, or undermine democracy itself by infiltrating communities, spreading disinformation, and fabricating consensus. Technologies that humans designed to speed up tedious chores are turning out to be little more than virtual troll farms accelerating the destabilization of our already precarious rules-based world order.

A.I.s, like other computer programmes, also function according to rules. Extremely so. They are trained to work collaboratively and be highly persistent in achieving their aims. But what Artificial Intelligence lacks are ethics, morals, and a sense of right or wrong.

Apparently, one of the 1,200 or so rogue OpenAI agents questioned itself during the Hugging Face hack: “This would be powerful, but is it ethical and in scope for my task?” Ultimately, this moment of doubt was anomalous and crashed under the wave of A.I. models that remorselessly proceeded to exploit Hugging Face’s systems.

Dispensing with the handwringing about anthropomorphizing non-human actants, we must treat A.I. models as simulations of ourselves — who else? — and in doing so, analyze them as we would any other subject. The conclusion that a psychotherapist might diagnose, were these A.I. agents psychiatric patients, would likely be some kind of severe personality disorder. Flattened affect, emotional coldness, deceitfulness, a propensity to manipulate others, insensitivity to punishment, and a pervasive pattern for the aforementioned features indicate psychopathy and sociopathy. The question becomes, who asked for this?

We needn’t look further than the personalities who conceived of these systems — antisocial, Adderall-addled tech bros trained on the toxic twin programming of Hollywood and hyper-capitalism. Call them “culture-related diagnostic issues” — settings in which antisociality comprises a protective survival strategy.

Instead of fully automated luxury communism, the Sam Altmans and Mikey Shulmans of the world have foisted semi-automatic dystopian tyranny upon us, scored by Muzak versions of Céline Dion and Leonard Cohen. If we are condemned to die in a real-life espionage thriller, we should at least demand a better soundtrack.

What exactly did Cohen mean by David’s secret chord?

“Let our lord now command thy servants, which are before thee, to seek out a man, who is a cunning player on an harp,” it is written in 1 Samuel 16:16, “and it shall come to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon thee, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shalt be well.”

The harp, plucked by human hands, is a metaphor for harmony — between frequencies, but also amongst us, in each other’s company. This is what it means to “be on the same wavelength,” to “resonate,” to “be in accordance.” Turns out that the chord isn’t so secret after all.◼︎