I've Lived Long Enough to Hear an A.I.-Generated Bon Jovi Song in Olympic Ice Dancing

"On Monday, the Games' ice dancers showed off their intimate footwork to the greatest hits of the 1990s as part of the competition's rhythm dance event. As any skating fan will tell you, the introduction of music with lyrics to the ice-dance repertoire in recent years has led to all kinds of copyright clashes; figure skater Amber Glenn just settled a dispute with a Canadian musician outraged by the use of his song in her gold-winning Team USA routine."

"That move may have warded off the lawyers, but it didn't slide past Olympic viewers. Disgusted reactions ensued immediately after Mrázková and Mrázek took the ice and NBC's announcers pointed out that, while half of their choreography was set to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck," the other half had been soundtracked by A.I. The ISU's own documentation identifies the track as something called "One Two," created by an A.I. prompted to come up with something resembling "90s style Bon Jovi.""

"This wasn't even the siblings' first A.I.-music experiment. Shana Bartels reported back in November that when Mrázková and Mrázek competed in Skate Canada, they had a different A.I. complement to their "Thunderstruck" routine: a Bon Jovi-style generation that ripped off various lyrics from New Radicals' "You Get What You Give." Gráinne Nielsen, an artist who specializes in paintings of figure skaters, shared a TikTok video comparing the authentic '90s classic to its bizarre replication."

At the Milan Cortina Olympics, ice dancers Kateřina Mrázková and Daniel Mrázek combined AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" with an A.I.-generated 1990s-style track titled "One Two." The International Skating Union permits copyright-free soundalikes, so the duo used an A.I. prompt to evoke "90s style Bon Jovi." Viewers reacted with disgust and NBC announcers noted the A.I. accompaniment. Earlier at Skate Canada the same siblings used a different A.I. generation that reportedly lifted lyrics from New Radicals' "You Get What You Give," and a TikTok comparison highlighted the replication's oddness.

Read at Slate Magazine