When AI zealots try to evangelize their techno-religion of choice to people, they always do so by going for the big, obvious, society-lifting benefits, like its ability to take the clothing off attractive people in pictures you see of them on the internet, or provide tax advice for the lethally incurious. For some reason, these people never pitch the more niche use cases, the ones that might really impact someone on a day-to-day basis. Like, why is nobody selling artificial intelligence as the ultimate tool for annoying the ever-loving shit out of Billy Joel?
This is per THR, which reports—with a bit too much credulity, for our tastes—on a new project in which a guy whose family has a long-running beef with the “Piano Man” singer has taken a “lost” radio interview with Joel, then used AI and old pictures of the musician to create an AI film. Titled 1971: Billy Joel’s Lost Interview, the 20-minute project has reportedly done everything in its power to insulate itself from Joel’s lawyers: The images used to train the AI that made it are all owned by the film’s producers, as is the audio, which was recorded by the cousin of Joel’s first manager, Irwin Mazur, during a radio interview right at the start of Joel’s career. Mazur then passed the audio on to director Adam Ripp, son of an early Joel producer, Artie Ripp—who, like Mazur, had a major falling out with the artist in the 1970s—who decided to chuck the whole thing into the Machine and see what got shat out.
Ripp and Mazur could, of course, have just released the audio, and gotten a nice little chunk of attention for themselves. (In the clip featured in the project’s trailer, they focus on a juicy bit in which a 22-year-old Joel, fresh off the release of his first album, seems to contradict his future self, dismissing Madison Square Garden as a “rip-off” only favored by artists trying to bilk their fans for the largest possible amount of money.) Instead, they’ve set the audio to ugly video of a waxy corpse that looks vaguely like Billy Joel, rendering an interesting curiosity into a disagreeable freak show. Nevertheless, the “documentary” is getting airtime, having been picked up for a showcase by the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame—which, you’d think, out of all the music Halls Of Fame in the world, would be the one that’d most want to stay on Joel’s good side. (Joel himself hasn’t publicly commented on the project, or its inclusion in the Hall’s Music Documentary Film Festival.) Ripp, meanwhile—who previously served as a screenwriter on Billy And Me, an unauthorized movie from Mazur’s perspective that Joel has denounced—claims the entire aim of the project is “to honor the legacy of Billy Joel,” which feels pretty goddamn rich.
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