Karma and the Killjoys Take on AI

Karma and the Killjoys’ Rain Scott-Catoire

The Baton Rouge band wrote their first sea shanty to address AI and piracy.

During the recent Folk Alliance International conference in New Orleans, the anxiety about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in one panel was so palpable that AI was almost on the panel. Baton Rouge’s Karma and the Killjoys recently released the video for “This Song was Stolen by Pirates,” their expression of the same concerns.

Karma and the Killjoys will play Jazz Fest on Thursday, April 23, but the song’s a misleading introduction to the band. As the title suggests, “This Song was Stolen by Pirates” is a sea shanty, and “we've never written a sea shanty or something even close to that style,” songwriter Rain Scott-Catoire says.

Still, she sees the connective tissue between it and the rest of the band’s catalog. “Even our most wacky songs still have a quality that makes them Karma and the Killjoys, whether it's the piano-driven music, the stacked harmonies, or the layered guitars.”

The video is a high concept presentation with Scott-Catoire as a pirate in custody and a complicated relationship with her computer. The video ends with a sequence that recalls the last minutes of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Her pirate appears to have escaped, but it was only a dream. The bleak truth is that there is no escape.

“I think the core of my AI anxiety comes from imagining a world where art becomes soulless,” Scott-Catoire says. “Not even the lack of originality so much as a lack of heart that went into creating it. Art is inherently a human creation, but now we've sort of given that up. ‘I’ve stolen your skin, now I wear it as mine.’”

The Folk Alliance panel struggled to focus on just one issue when talking about AI, and Scott-Catoire has the same problem. She’s also worried about the environmental impact, and how AI might affect consumers. Will they come to prefer quantity over quality? A bunch of good-enough songs over one great one? Will it hurt people’s interest in live shows?

Last year, AI band The Velvet Sundown came out of the box credible enough for more than a million people to follow them on Spotify, and AI country artist Rusted Root topped Billboard’s Country Digital Downloads chart in November—a less impressive accomplishment than it might seem in a streaming age, but it’s not nothing. Hip-hop producer Timbaland introduced what he called the first AI pop star, TaTa Taktumi, and AI gospel artist Xania Monet signed a multi-million dollar recording deal.

In the face of all that, Scott-Catoire still has some hope. “I have to believe the rise of AI will also bring about a renaissance of humanity,” she says. “That people will get sick of the digital and crave real, human-made art again. I know I do!”

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