08/26/2026
This frustrated me.
I decided to try to set up an ad today using my video about "St. James Infirmary" and "The Young Sailor Cut Down in His Prime." Did you see that video? It was about how the songs are considered the SAME song. I did not suggest a hierarchy. I did not talk about how they were "worlds different." And yet, instead of prompting me to write my own ad text, Facebook auto-generated this slop and two other paragraphs like it.
I dislike having to rely on Meta to spread the word about my podcast, and I wish I could rely purely on word-of-mouth and collaborations, because Meta is obsessed with useless, immoral AI tools, and I don't want to contribute to that. And I hate that AI has generated this text, because this is exactly the kind of rhetoric that Folk Files was created to dismantle.
Saying that a recording of a White source singer is more "authentic" than a professional Black musician's recording is exactly what causes the disenfranchisement and schisms that I discussed in the episode on the blues. Folk music isn't better if it's sung by an untrained source singer. Folk is for ALL the folk, including those with vocal training and access to production tools.
Needless to say, I rewrote this garbage. But this is just a reminder that hierarchies have no place in folk music, and generative AI is embarrassing.
