The Dutch Interior AI-Generated Bullshit Fiasco
AI is already fucking up the music world for all the wrong reasons. Generative models are trained on entire back catalogues without the consent of the original artists, stitching ‘new songs’ from other people’s hard work as musicians find themselves unwilling participants in the free-for-all.
But the excellent country band Dutch Interior were recently the victim of a bizarre new threat, as Meta AI invented damaging falsehoods about the band out of thin air, and disseminated them to thousands of potential fans.
Dutch Interior are a great band, with a sound that lovingly harks back to an earlier era. Their new album Moneyball is a stunning collection of songs that’s lush, warm, and masterfully played, made by musicians deeply in love with their craft, and it deserves a lot of press attention. They’re heading out on a UK tour this September with dates at The Hug & Pint in Glasgow, Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, London’s George Tavern, and a slot at End of the Road Festival.
Dutch Interior recently posted an Instagram reel about a sound engineer ranting at them during their soundcheck, and Meta’s AI added a suggested search link at the top of the comments reading “Dutch Interior Controversy”. Clicking it revealed a completely nonsensical story about the band being from the Netherlands, that their name had ties to white supremacy, and that their music had been removed from streaming platforms as a result. None of this is true.
The name Dutch Interior actually comes from a series of paintings, and their music is still very much available everywhere. Meta’s AI confidently presented the lie that they were white supremacists who’d been removed from streaming services to tens of thousands of people, and from that point things only got stranger.
After the band posted a reel explaining what had happened, Meta AI doubled down, and started generating even more fabricated summaries, now alleging that Dutch Interior had sparked a backlash for wearing Native American headdresses on stage and were using bots to boost their popularity through the controversy. Instead of redacting the lies, the AI kept inventing new ones, compounding the damage in a surreal, computer-based Chinese whispers where the story kept growing more extreme and absurd.
Dutch Interior’s whole project is a celebration of the human touch, a masterclass in tactile, hand-crafted country-folk, played on real instruments by a tight-knit ensemble, rooted in tradition and warmth, which makes their clash with Meta’s automated Burn Book all the more surreal. They’re now forced to issue statements denying false claims about white supremacy and cultural appropriation because an AI bot decided to turn their name into clickbait controversy. Hopefully the absurdity of this episode might draw more listeners towards a genuinely great band, who are playing some of the UK’s best grassroots venues later this year. They deserve much more attention, but not because they’ve been branded extremists by Mark Zuckerberg’s AI dumb waiter.
