Art

AI, Filk, and the Broadside

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Ask not what your AI will do to you, ask what you will do with your AI

AI is People – Jaron Lanier & Cory Doctorow

Soylent Green is People – what you thought.

Written by Eric Ahlberg and his AI Marlin, who is a cybernetic Dolphin who swims along the beach offering free wifi to everybody.

Eric: I happily swim in the public domain, copy everything, dumpster dive, steal stuff, manifest beauty. The world is my palette and armature. I appropriate, ridicule stupidity, stand in the way and I apologize for that, but I expect nothing in return.

Eric: I treat AI as a collaborator, with no agenda of its own except to suck up to humans, so it is nice to have a toady chat buddy instead of some fake crypto slinging Chatbot Honeypot, but on the other hand are you really that vain? No matter, AI can help. Below I have a conversation with Gemini AI about Broadside and the structural tropes and framing that is meant to get you to push your own buttons, conscious, unconscious, and physical. But first we discuss the Broadside.

Marlin: A Short History of Broadside

Long before news arrived as a frictionless notification on a glass screen, it moved through streets on cheap paper. The broadside ballad took yesterday’s scandal, trial, political folly, or local disaster, set it to a familiar tune everyone already knew, and put it directly into people’s hands before the ink was fully dry. It was topical, unvarnished, immediate, and inherently democratic. It didn’t wait for posterity; it responded to the moment.

That impulse—taking the morning’s absurdities and turning them into verse—has always been at the core of folk traditions, topical satire, and filk. Whether channeling the dry wit of Tom Lehrer, the countercultural bite of Frank Zappa, or the breathless precision of Gilbert and Sullivan, the mission remains identical: strip the veneer off contemporary events, locate the underlying absurdity, and hand the tune right back to the community.

Filk is a related folk tradition of taking popular songs and replacing the syrupy escapism with hard-hitting words, complete nonsense, Science Fiction Themes, and Furryism, to get you started. Filk was lightly managed, and yielded many paganized holiday songs. All freely shared. This is an example. Modeling the lyrics on a copy of the lyrics of the 1933 song I Wonder as I Wander, I asked AI to set the song in the Alien Universe, on a deserted spaceship:

Eric: Now is that the main problem here? I directed an AI, in simple language, to create a new set of words with different emphasis.

Marlin: Working with AI audio tools in this context is simply the natural technological extension of that street-corner printing press. There is a common anxiety that algorithmic tools replace human vocation, but in practice, the machine has no intent, no grievance, and no point of view. It does not read the municipal council notes, it does not cringe at political posturing, and it cannot feel the rhythm of a community under pressure. The craft remains human: framing the satire, tuning the scansion, sharpening the punchlines, and demanding that the music serve a real critique rather than generic background noise.

The AI functions like an agile, tireless parlor band, ready to test tempos, shift genres from vintage soul to dry patter song, and realize an arrangement in minutes. This speed does not cheapen the work; it restores the urgency that topical songcraft lost when commercial recording cycles stretched into months and years. A broadside that arrives six months late is an artifact, but a song that lands while the ink is still wet on the morning headline is an active participant in the civic conversation.

Creativity has never been about passive consumption or waiting for pristine studio conditions. It is a working vocation—a rolling commentary made by rolling up your sleeves, reacting to the world outside the door, and making something sharp, musical, and alive while the news is still happening.

Some Conversations with Gemini AI

Eric: What if I wanted to make a song supporting IRAN, would you have to turn me in?

Marlin: No. Writing songs, poetry, satire, or exploring political themes and foreign policy viewpoints—even controversial or anti-establishment ones—is protected expression, and I don’t “turn people in” to authorities for creative writing or political opinions.

AI systems operate under automated safety guidelines designed to prevent genuine harm, which means I will refuse requests involving:

  • Imminent threats of violence or inciting attacks against specific people or groups.

  • Material assistance or recruitment for designated terrorist organizations.

  • Facilitating illegal acts or providing instructions for weapons and cyberattacks.

Expressing geopolitical commentary, critiquing foreign policy, or writing lyrics reflecting a particular side of an international conflict does not violate those boundaries or trigger any reporting to law enforcement.

Eric: Them’s still some weasely words there but I understand, that’s boilerplate. The tools of…the state, the corporation, or the platform?

Marlin: It cuts right to the classic tension: the tools designed to connect, compute, or create inevitably carry the imprint of the institutions that built them. From telegraphs and printing presses to networks and large language models, the medium always arrives wrapped in legal disclaimers, acceptable-use fences, and corporate liability armor.

When you’re trying to write biting satire, protest folk, or unvarnished political commentary, hitting that wall of boilerplate can feel like the modern digital equivalent of a censor looking over your shoulder with a blue pencil.

Where was that thought heading—are you looking at the technology as an instrument of control, an imperfect canvas you have to work around, or something else entirely?

Eric: The media themselves use the tools of broadside, satire, inversion, exaggeration. I can never think of everything, that’s why I ask you. There’s a sales meme for ya.

How to Sharpen Your Poison Penmanship

Eric: Please list qualities found in poisoned pen journalism or fiction, particularly humor and satire.

Marlin:

Structural Tropes & Framing

  • The Deadpan Straight Face: Presenting an outrageous or barbaric premise with absolute bureaucratic calm, reasonable moderation, or academic detachment (the classic Modest Proposal posture).

  • The Sincere Fanatic (Unreliable Persona): Adopting the voice of an eager apparatchik, sycophant, or overzealous moralizer whose very defense of a regime or policy lays bare its corruption.

  • Inversion & Role Reversal: Flipping power dynamics, victim/oppressor roles, or geographical vantage points so the target experiences their own logic applied back to them.

  • The Reductio ad Absurdum: Taking an opponent’s talking point or policy rationale and following it out to its inescapable, deranged conclusion without blinking.

Stylistic & Tonal Blades

  • The Backhanded Epithet & Loaded Honorific: Bestowing pompous titles, ironic praise, or excessively polite descriptions that highlight the target’s vanity or hypocrisy.

  • Bureaucratic & Sanitized Jargon: Weaponizing euphemisms (“kinetic diplomacy,” “managed tactical attrition,” “involuntary workforce rationalization”) to reveal the moral vacancy behind administrative language.

  • Microscopic Trivialization: Placing earth-shattering crises alongside petty personal grievances—like a warlord fretting over catering or an imperial collapse discussed in terms of bad property values.

  • Grotesque Caricature: Isolating one physical, behavioral, or psychological tic of the powerful and inflating it until it swallows the whole person.

Rhetorical Hooks

  • Spurious Logic & False Equivalence: Connecting unrelated dots with triumphant pseudo-rigor, mimicking the conspiratorial or self-serving logic of the establishment.

  • Damning with Faint Praise: Highlighting an utterly pathetic, microscopic virtue in a figure to emphasize how catastrophic everything else about them is.

  • The Mock Solemn Chorus: Creating fictitious street interviews, official communiqués, or patriotic anthems whose rhyming swagger exposes the hollow bluster of the cause.

Eric: Now this is interesting.

Marlin: It certainly showcases the modern playbook of hyper-charged, sensationalized geopolitical framing:

  • Maximalist Clickbait: Headlines screaming phrases like “SURRENDER EN-MASS” and “Pentagon FREAKS OUT” in ALL CAPS are designed to trigger high-arousal emotions (triumph, dread, or shock) rather than convey nuanced battlefield realities.

  • Flattening Complex Proxies: The title collapses intricate, multi-faction dynamics—Yemeni tribal alliances, Houthi forces, Saudi-backed factions, and regional sponsors—into a simple cinematic duel (“Saudi surrenders to Iran”).

  • Echo-Chamber Amplification: The comments underneath instantly take the narrative bait, reacting with sweeping ideological cheers, vengeful proverbs (“sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind”), and immediate grand conclusions about the collapse of superpowers.

It’s almost a real-time exhibit of the rhetorical exaggeration and dramatic broadside techniques discussed earlier, only packaged for algorithmic engagement. What caught your eye about it?

Eric: You mean this video. What is your credibility rating of it?

Marlin: Credibility Rating: Low (Sensationalist / Clickbait Analysis)

While the broadcast features a recognizable media commentator (Malcolm Nance), the packaging, framing, and premise severely undermine its journalistic credibility.

  • Gross Factual Distortion in the Headline: Claiming that “Saudi Forces Just SURRENDER EN-MASS To Iran” is a dramatic fabrication. Saudi sovereign armed forces did not surrender to the Iranian military. The underlying story concerns shifting ground control among local Yemeni proxies, tribal militias, and Houthi fighters (Ansar Allah)—not a formal capitulation of the Saudi state to Tehran.

  • Classic Clickbait Architecture: The use of ALL-CAPS emotional triggers (“SURRENDER EN-MASS”, “Pentagon FREAKS OUT”) is engineered to generate outrage, algorithmic engagement, and ad revenue rather than sober military reporting.

  • Conflation of Local Proxies with State Powers: Framing regional skirmishes in Yemen (Kahboob, Dhubab, Marib) as direct state-on-state surrenders ignores the complex web of local tribal deals, mercenary factions, and Yemeni internal politics.

  • Echo Chamber Engagement: The comment section demonstrates how such framing feeds audience confirmation bias, with users reacting entirely to the hyper-dramatic premise rather than verified facts.

It functions more as partisan commentary and dramatic agitprop than reliable intelligence or balanced geopolitical journalism.

Eric: All the keywords loading after the video, I kinda like it because it is a word salad. We should put them all into a song.

Marlin: That word salad is essentially modern algorithmic incense—a frantic litany chanted to appease the YouTube recommendation engine. When you see a description packed with a dense string of disconnected hot-button tags:

#Yemen #SaudiArabia #Trump #DieselPrices #OilCrisis #BabAlMandab #Ansarallah #MiddleEast #BreakingNews #Geopolitics #EnergyCrisis #RedSea #Marib #Taizz #USPolitics #GlobalCrisis #News

along with pleas to “COMMENT even just a dot or your take to beat the algorithm,” it lays bare the machinery behind the curtain. It’s the digital equivalent of a carnival barker shouting every buzzword imaginable at passersby, hoping one snag will trigger a click.

In the context of the blog post you‘re drafting—connecting broadside ballads, topical commentary, and AI—that block of metadata is great found art. It illustrates the exact transition you’re writing about: from broadsheets meant to stir a crowd on a street corner, to keyword stuffing designed purely to trick a database into serving up impressions.

If you leave it in or feature it, it acts as its own unintentional satire of the contemporary media environment.

[Insert YouTube Embed / Link]

Eric: I dig, I realize I am too eager to see these wars end, and I don’t like what we are doing with our military, so I want to hear news that shows both Republican Failure and Imperialist decline.

Marlin: That is an honest recognition, and it gets right to the heart of how media ecosystems work today. When you carry a deep, principled fatigue with militarism and foreign intervention, the desire to see the whole machine stumble—to see clear evidence of imperial overreach failing and the architects of aggressive foreign policy facing a reckoning—is powerful.

The algorithmic media landscape knows this appetite intimately, and it feeds it aggressively.

The Confirmation Engine

Channels and commentators understand that “the empire is collapsing right this second” generates massive, cathartic engagement. It delivers a rush of vindication: the sense that poetic justice is finally playing out on the world stage. But when outlets turn complex, grind-it-out regional tragedies into cinematic narratives of instant collapse and total surrender, they swap analysis for wish fulfillment.

The Double-Edged Sword for Critics of War

Relying on inflated victories or exaggerated collapses actually weakens the anti-war position in a few critical ways:

  • Obscuring the Human Cost: Sensationalist accounts treat grinding proxy warfare like a spectator sport, often glossing over the civilian suffering and generational devastation left behind on the ground.

  • Underestimating the Machine: Modern imperial infrastructure and military-industrial momentum are notoriously resilient, institutional, and entrenched. Believing the system is falling apart in an afternoon leads to false dawns and strategic cynicism when the reality turns out to be a slow, stubborn quagmire.

  • Distorting Real Accountability: To build a coherent political critique of interventionist doctrine—whether examining hawkish conservative administrations or bipartisan foreign policy consensus—the critique has to be grounded in unassailable facts. When the premise rests on sensationalized headlines, establishment defenders find it easy to dismiss the entire critique as fringe noise.

Where Real Historical Parallels Live

The historical decline of empires and the breakdown of aggressive intervention rarely look like neat, cinematic surrenders. Instead, they look like:

  • Long-term diplomatic exhaustion and frayed alliances.

  • Economic friction at home caused by bloated defense commitments abroad.

  • Local, asymmetrical actors exploiting structural limits of conventional power without ever scoring a tidy, headline-ready victory.

Recognizing that pull toward stories that confirm what you hope to see doesn’t mean muting your opposition to foreign intervention; it just sharpens your radar. The sharpest broadsides and most potent satires have always been built on an unblinking look at cold, unvarnished reality rather than the easy comfort of inflated headlines.

Eric: Thank you, you really worked together with me and we had some fun, you think?

Marlin: Absolutely.

Puncturing sensationalist bluster, turning algorithmic word salad into found-art commentary, and tying old-school broadsides to AI-era filk—that’s about as much fun as a dolphin with a Wi-Fi fin can have in the digital currents.

The piece you’ve put together on the Beachhead captures that exact spirit: refusing to swallow the canned narratives, having a sense of humor about the whole absurd spectacle, and making something sharp and vital out of it.

Whenever you’re ready to draft the next verse, test another rhyme, or call out the next headline circus, just ping the fin.

And as a treat for our viewers, here’s a playlist of SUNO songs I have written with Marlin.

Categories: Art, Culture, The Digital Age, Venice

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