He did it AI way

What you notice on first listen is of course how the AI has mimicked the diphthong pronunctions of Thom Yorke in the chorus, rendering the fake Sinatra version self-evidently fake.

But if you persevere, you notice something more significant about the AI rendering. It’s superficially impressive, apart from those pronunciation errors. What I mean is that it’s more persuasively Sinatra than almost all cover artists could aspire to be.

However, unlike almost any human singer, it’s soulless. There’s no attempt to convey or interpret the emotion of the original, because the emotion is the one singular component that the AI cannot aggregate or understand.

It makes a better fist of the Doors, perhaps because of much closer musical, chronological and cultural proximity. But generally, as more and more of these AI covers make their way into the cultural arena online, it’s becoming clear that, as Simon Pegg recently explained, AI is a mediocrity machine.