It was not a typical House Judiciary Committee hearing. Country music star Lainey Wilson was in attendance, for one thing, but the most unusual aspect of the February summit on AI and identity theft was when Rep. Darrell Issa played what sounded an awful lot like Johnny Cash singing the lyrics to Danish-Norwegian dance-pop anthem “Barbie Girl.”
Dustin Ballard, who created that AI-assisted anomaly, is not a regular viewer of C-SPAN, so he didn’t learn about the hearing until much later. When a friend finally did send over a clip, though, he found it surreal to hear one of his gonzo audio experiments playing within such a stuffy setting. He also found it kind of scary.
“I didn’t know if I was in trouble or not,” Ballard says.
Some of the politicians at that hearing, not to mention some of the musicians who recently signed an open letter demanding protections from AI, might think Ballard should be in trouble—or at least shouldn’t be allowed to ventriloquize Johnny Cash from beyond the grave. Alarm bells have been ringing for some time over AI’s potential for criminal fraud. But as long as the tech exists for The Beatles to revive John Lennon on a new song, gray areas will remain within the usage of AI in music. And creators like Ballard will continue plumbing those areas to make songs that are more complicated than meets the ear—and perhaps less fraudulent.
Ballard’s cheeky ongoing musical project, There I Ruined It, lives inside the overlap between “Weird Al” Yankovic and mashup-monster Girl Talk. Like “Weird Al,” he might give the Red Hot Chili Peppers even goofier lyrics than the actual ones, or add a dash of polka in unlikely places. Like Girl Talk, he often treats disparate artists like Barbie dolls forced to kiss—making the Beach Boys cover Jay-Z or Conway Twitty take on 50 Cent. He just happens to use AI to complete the effect, although the software was not yet accessible when Ballard got started.
There I Ruined it began as an early-COVID activity to stave off boredom. Ballard, who is a creative director at an ad agency in Dallas, was stuck indoors like everyone else in the summer of 2020. He hadn’t played a show with his Western swing band in weeks and needed something to occupy his time. The solution came to him, he says, in a dream: What about something like those Bad Lip-Reading videos, but for music? Shortly after, he posted on YouTube, “Shallow – Polka Edition,” an accordion-heavy version of the Star is Born hit, featuring his own vocals. It tickled Ballard to imagine an alternate universe where this was the song Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga lovingly performed at the Oscars, even if it sounded like the opposite of an earworm.
The video blew up on Reddit, and fetched 100k views on YouTube in one day. People seemed to like hearing songs “ruined,” so Ballard decided he would ruin more of them. He made a backing track of kooky kids’ music, and contorted vocals from the Drowning Pool rager, “Bodies,” around it. He pitch-shifted Eminem’s rapping on the Oscar-winning “Lose Yourself” to match the 8-bit chiptune theme from Super Mario Bros.
As the videos continued finding audiences, he started making shorter clips for TikTok and Instagram Reels, quickly expressing just the essence of an idea—15 seconds of The Sound of Music set to Metallica, say, and that’s that. Ballard had already gained more than a million TikTok followers using this approach—he now has 3.5 million—by the time he began experimenting with AI last summer, three years into his project.
“I’m not particularly tech-savvy,” Ballard says, “but AI had such a direct application to the sorts of things I was doing that I figured out how to use it and now it’s opened up another branch of creativity for how to ‘ruin’ music.”
Johnny Cash singing “Barbie Girl” was one of his earliest flirtations with this new technology, and, thanks to Congress, it’s become his most well-known, if not his most viral. (That honor belongs to the AI-free “Yeah” song, a smorgasbord of cherry-picked yeahs from various hit singles, which has more than 40 million views on TikTok alone.) But one thing many of those who have listened to the ruination of Johnny Cash might not be aware of: that it’s not the product of someone gingerly smashing the Johnny Cash button on an AI program. Instead, Ballard has to enter into music software Pro Tools either an existing backing track or one he’s arranged himself, create an AI voice model of the person he intends to imitate, and then run his own vocal impersonation through that AI model. He even created a before-and-after video to show curious parties where his voice ends and Johnny Cash’s begins.
“It’s still a 95% human process,” Ballard says. “This is just one step at the very end.”
But it’s this one step, of course, that’s brought There I Ruined It a lot of unwanted attention.
Although the fair use doctrine in the U.S. copyright statute protects parodies from infringement claims, Ballard has had issues from day one with copyright strikes—legal requests from copyright-owners to remove content from YouTube. While enough artists such as Snoop Dogg, Charlie Puth, and Joe Jonas have reacted favorably to getting “ruined” that Ballard could compile them in a supercut, record labels have been less impressed. Many have demanded he take down videos over the years. With little recourse for fighting back on YouTube, he’s had to comply several times. (The Johnny Cash song, for instance, is no longer available online.)
Just as Ballard started accruing followers faster after adding AI into the mix, he also endured a corresponding uptick in copyright takedowns over the same span. The congressional hearing earlier this year is just one part of the broader push to crack down on anyone using AI to recreate famous voices in any context. The U.S. copyright office recently issued a report on digital replicas, charging that AI vocal imitations can make it difficult for audiences to distinguish between parody and the real deal, potentially leading to confusion and reputational damage.
Ballard doesn’t understand how his playful videos could mislead anyone, though, let alone cause reputational damage.
“The way I use AI is really no different than Photoshop,” he says. “You can have a publication like The Onion make a very realistic Photoshop job of a celebrity doing whatever they want, and because it’s clearly parody, nobody has any issue with it. But as soon as it goes to the audio equivalent—a clearly labeled parody changing somebody’s voice in a humorous way—people seem to have a problem with that.”
A lot of other creators experimenting with AI and copyrighted work could in no way be categorized as parody artists, and seem to be playing in a much different sandbox than Ballard. This “new” Nirvana song, whose guitar riff sounds like someone half-remembering how to play “Polly” and whose singing seems assembled, ransom note-style, from Kurt Cobain outtakes, is irresponsible. It exists only because it can. Ditto this “unreleased” Billie Eilish track, and this fake collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd, which racked up a quarter-million streams on Spotify before it was rightly removed.
If the differences between those AI concoctions and Ballard’s project weren’t clear enough, the fact that he has parlayed it into an AI-free live concert series in Texas should seal the deal. These shows, which Ballard has been striving to put together for years, underline the fact that what’s surrounding this particular uncanny valley is a vast landscape of true musicianship.
As for what’s next, Ballard is looking into the potential for a nationwide tour, if there’s enough demonstrated interest. Beyond that, however, is a surprise Ballard cannot ruin even for himself.
“I’ve achieved everything I set out to do with this and then some. Really, I’m trying to keep it as just a fun, creative outlet for me,” he says. “It’s never been about money, which is fortunate because most everything I post on YouTube gets flagged anyway, and the profits go directly to the record labels. I have no other plans besides just trying to have fun and see where it can evolve.”