In brief
- Catchy dance tracks about national teams competing in the upcoming FIFA World Cup have taken off on social media.
- Each follows a similar formula, sharing near-identical beat, but different languages, team names and players.
From the vuvuzela in South Africa in 2010 to Seven Nation Army chanted by Italian fans in 2006, each FIFA World Cup has had its own unofficial soundtrack.
But in the lead-up to this year's tournament, catchy fan-made dance tracks for different teams are going viral on social media, with some amassing millions of views.
France's Imbattables (French for "unbeatable") appeared to be the first, followed by a wave of similar songs for Portugal, Brazil, Türkiye, Argentina and Spain, among others.
But there's a catch — they are generated by artificial intelligence.
Each follows a similar formula: a near-identical beat, with swapped out languages, team names and players.
Aside from Imbattables, which is credited to French AI artist Crystalo, the songs viewed by SBS News did not explicitly state they were AI-generated and were posted by anonymous accounts with small followings.
Listeners appear none the wiser with the songs well-received, aside from occasional comments describing them as "AI slop".
SBS News spoke with the broadcaster's foreign language audio teams, some of whom said the songs translated well and could pass as human-made.
But SBS Portuguese noted Portugal Invictos (Portuguese for "undefeated") featured a Brazilian accent, while SBS Spain said their team's song referenced injured or lesser-known players whose World Cup participation is uncertain.
'Telltale markers'
Oliver Bown, a professor at the University of New South Wales School of Art and Design, said it was becoming increasingly difficult to determine if music was AI-generated or not.
"There are some telltale markers, but of course those markers also can correlate to people's production techniques anyway," he told SBS News.
"Most quality AI music production involves some, usually quite complex, process of human intervention … so there's always a bit of a human hand in anything that people claim is pure AI."
Bown said AI often fell short when it came to recognising cultural nuances, such as accents, which may not be picked up unless the producer is a native speaker.
"It's just increasingly common that people will go ahead and put content out that doesn't have that really basic quality control," he said.
"That can be just amusing, but it can also be seriously offensive in certain cultural contexts."
He said the trend also blurred the ethical lines around AI-generated art.
"I think this is such a significant example because there's this clear response and you get a lot of commentators saying, 'I hate the idea of AI, but wow, this is a banging tune'," he said.
"I think we're going to see this more and more, that the sort of fault lines between loving it and hating it get confused by the fact that sometimes AI is perfectly capable of producing something that's quite remarkable."
Brent Keogh, a music and sound design lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, also analysed the songs and said they appeared to be AI-generated.
"[It seems] like it's a similar person generating each of those songs for that particular country because they're all in a very similar style," he told SBS News.
While he had reservations about AI-generated music, Keogh said AI tools could play a role in "democratising" football songs, particularly if fans were disappointed with official releases.
But he warned there was also a darker side.
"The threat is certainly there in terms of replacing musicians' jobs or graphic designers' jobs or voiceover work," he said.
"The end consequence of that is this dehumanising of the media that we consume, of the work that we do and in the end, I think we are all just going to end up very bored."
This story was produced in collaboration with SBS Spanish and SBS Portuguese.
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