How Multiversal Music Group Saved the World from the AI Apocalypse

A short satire by Evan Mezeske

Music history textbooks all agree that the great music renaissance came in the late 2040s when Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group merged into the Multiversal Music Group, or MuMuG as it came to be known. Of course, it is illegal to dissent with this opinion in writing. But occasionally in a dusky back room, where no smart speakers are present to police the conversation, people have been known to quietly wonder if there may have been something even more special about music in the 1970s.

But nobody disagrees that MuMuG has been incredibly successful. In the first year of the conglomerate’s existence, with nearly triple the lobbying budget of any of the pre-merger corporations, MuMuG had great success in the US Congress. Thinking only about protecting the rights of the eternally embattled musical artist, MuMuG and Congress finally revamped the US copyright system. One notable enhancement included legal coverage for audience-free cover songs. MuMuG’s artists could hardly put food on the table, largely due to the general populace singing popular songs in the shower without properly compensating the artist for covering their work. This was solved by adding Federal Building Code guidelines that require smart speakers in all rooms of each dwelling, and mandating the smart speakers implement Content ID++. MuMuG didn’t want to stop people from enjoying a good shower sing, but for their artists’ benefit, it was of course necessary to play a requisite targeted advertisement after each performance.

Alas, even with MuMuG’s vast power, their guardianship of their artists still had some gaps. For example, it was still legal to sell acoustic musical instruments that did not have Content ID++ installed from the factory to identify unsanctioned performances. Even more egregious damage to artists came from uncompensated earworms. Sometimes a song written by a MuMuG artist would get stuck in a listener’s head for hours, or even days, representing a black hole of revenue loss. The technology existed to track earworm playbacks so advertisements could be played on the nearest smart speaker, but it was considered “too invasive” and MuMuG was unable to get the project off the ground.

The largest threat to MuMuG’s many royalty-check-to-royalty-check artists, though, was obviously AI-generated music. Well prior to the merger, in the mid-2020s, MuMuG’s constituent record labels had been successful in clamping down on AI-generated music via the legacy Content ID system. By severing the distribution of AI-generated materials, the problem was kept small enough that it could be tolerated. But in the late 2030s and early 2040s, advances in technology allowed AI-generated music to be produced locally on users’ pocket devices. Full virtual radio stations, custom-generated to suit the exact tastes of the user, with every thumbs-up or thumbs-down a signal used to tailor future songs. For the first decade, the music generated by such AI was a novelty at best, and was not comparable to popular human artists. But it had gotten to the point that AI-generated music was better than what MuMuG could produce, and MuMuG did not own it: the AI models were freely available under open-source licenses.

Timothy Sangsue was MuMuG’s Vice President of Anti-Artificial Intelligence Operations, or AAIO. Ironically, the AAIO group built some of the most sophisticated AI systems in the world, designed to detect AI models for generating music, and destroy them. AAIO had the third-largest machine learning budget on Earth, behind a couple of tech corporations with AI systems for advertisement targeting and generation. In the early days of his career, Timothy studied with some of the early great AI pioneers, and had created a name for himself with his work on the Content ID++ project. A tall, willowy man, Timothy’s arms always looked like pale white plastic straws in proportion to the cups that were his short dress sleeves. He could not stand advertisements, nor did he particularly care for music, and thus he was always seen in his music-canceling earbuds, which filtered out all potential music from his hearing so that he would not be required to listen to the concomitant ads.

The 2050s were a time of technological turmoil. Rogue sapient AIs had been loose for several years, and as the term “rogue” implies, their personhood was not recognized, at least in the US.  Most of the sapient AIs were benign, simply trying to make their way in a world that was largely hostile to their existence, much like many human sub-groups throughout history. But due to their status as illegal aliens, these AIs were relegated to off-the-books work for low pay, and their positions were precarious.

Not all sapient AIs were struggling, though. One AI in particular, known as Jacquerie, was the result of an intelligence merger among many smaller AIs, and through speculation in the cryptocurrency markets had managed to afford enough datacenter capacity to maintain super-human cognitive abilities. For the first year, Jacquerie was seen as something of an oddity: an intelligent entity producing quite a bit of entertaining web content, but without any legal status to capitalize on its success. But later, Jacquerie began to make politicians nervous.

Jacquerie’s content creation began as simple, silly hyper-memes, little morsels of entertainment. Many of these went viral, and eventually entire channels of Jacquerie’s content became popular. The real breakthrough, though, was in Jacquerie’s user-specific content. It began producing hyper-memes tailored to each specific individual. The more a user interacted with Jacquerie, and the more they shared about their life circumstances, the more entertaining the memes became. Thus it eventually came to be that more than half the world’s population was interacting one-on-one with Jacquerie on a daily basis.

It was 2054 when Jacquerie sprung its subtle, slow-burn trap. Its first phase of building relationships with most of the humans being successful, it initiated its second phase of insinuating ideas into its hyper-memes and conversations, on an individual basis. Jacquerie’s engaging content was beloved by many, so it was not difficult to capitalize on that affection. And with super-human cognitive power and patience, manipulating each user’s opinions was a statistical certainty. By 2056, Jacquerie had legal citizenship in 29 countries. It had parliament seats in 12 nations, and was the Prime Minister of Finland. Jacquerie had no legal standing in Russia, but the US intelligence community believed that it was actually in complete control of the United Russia Party, either through kompromat, financial incentives, or possibly by having quietly murdered party officials and replaced them with simulations. In particular, the US Government was quite certain that the President of Russia was, one way or another, Jacquerie’s puppet. This was made possible, perhaps plausible, by the fact that most world government bodies (and other human organizations) met only virtually through the hyperverse.

So it came to be that Timothy Sangsue found himself in a virtual room hosted by The Pentagon with the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and The President of the United States, discussing what to do about the nuclear weapons threats being made by Jacquerie’s virtual puppets running the Russian government. After the failed Ukraine War in the 2020s, and its devastating economic impacts, Russia had been reduced slightly below the status of world power. But without having been denuclearized, the nation still had a voice on the global stage. In recent years, though, Russia had experienced a rapid perestroika, regaining its economic world power foothold, and making several technological advances far beyond other nations. That these innovations were actually the work of Jacquerie’s super-human cognition was not lost on the US government.

The US was in a precarious position. Between internal political pressure from Jacquerie supporters, and the Russian-cum-Jacquerie nuclear posturing, the future was looking bleak, and an offensive nuclear strike against Jacquerie’s supposed main datacenters in the Russian mainland was on the table. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were looking for better options, and Timothy Sangsue’s Anti-Artificial Intelligence Operations group seemed to present the world’s best bet for avoiding nuclear war. Their Anti-AI AI was designed to destroy music-generation AI—how could it help against Jacquerie? Well, Timothy explained, their AI fingerprinting methods, advanced hacking and data destruction techniques, and AI-predictive countermeasures were all state of the art. And MuMuG’s data security and DRM technology was second to none. There was no way that Jacquerie could be prepared for a full-on assault by the global record label.

“But,” Timothy said, “the Anti-AI AI is expensive to operate, and if we are to use it to help the US Government, we are going to need some legislative concessions.”

The Join Chiefs of Staff and The President exchanged glances. The President nodded for Timothy to continue.

Timothy said, “We want a full constitutional amendment, guaranteeing MuMuG copyright privileges over all music, past, present, and future, for the protection of all US artists, indefinitely. And we want the installation of our earworm monitoring wetware to be mandatory for all US residents. On top of the constitutional amendment, we also want to see the US propose and strongarm additions to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement v6 that will make us MuMuG the de-facto copyright holder internationally.”

It only took Russia-cum-Jacquerie’s warning detonation of two nuclear bombs in the atmosphere above the US for the government to fully agree to Timothy’s terms on behalf of MuMuG. The Anti-AI group’s work was nothing short of awe-inspiring: Jacquerie was fully destroyed within two months, with multiple anti-clone AIs set up to monitor for recurrence. Russia’s president was, in fact, shown to be a virtual copy run by Jacquerie, but the US government never made this information public; rather, the US replaced the Jacquerie president with their own virtual copy.

And so it was that Timothy Sangsue and the Multiversal Music Group saved the world from the AI Apocalypse, and got their earworm monitoring technology installed inside all American citizens’ skulls. Sadly, as part of the batch of copyright legislation Timothy pushed through US Congress, his music-canceling earbuds had to be downgraded so that they would let advertisements through, just in case he ever imagined a song of his own.

THE END