William “Sonny” Criss was the consummate working musician. Having started on the saxophone at 11 years old, Criss began his professional career filling in on gigs with bandleader Johnny Otis, before going on to play alongside jazz legends like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Cole Porter, and Dizzy Gillespie. Though he might never have risen to the level of a household name, his tremendous and ever-evolving output puts him in a league with some of the most celebrated bebop artists of his generation.
Today, most will interact with Criss’s music on a streaming service like Spotify or YouTube. Yet as these platforms fail to prevent the onslaught of AI slop, the musician’s streaming profiles are becoming a host for parasitic spam — and unfortunately, he’s not the only one.
In addition to Criss, profiles of artists including the vocalist Jean Carne, cornetist Red Nichols, and clarinetist Jimmie Noone have become inundated with various forms of AI spam. On Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon Music, each of these musicians recently picked up “new” singles plastered with AI-generated cover art, uploaded in 2026 and copyrighted to the publisher “Ami bacuk.”
Criss’s profile on Spotify, for example, started displatwo brand-new tunes, which is an impressive feat considering he died in 1977. Titled “Tell me why” and “but a heartache,” both feature a generic anime waifu on their cover, and were supposedly composed by “Zainul Irpan,” a mashup of two generic Arabic-rooted names.
