The NFL Scrubbing Alicia Keys’ Super Bowl Sour Note From The Internet Shows How Successful Censorship Can Be

Super Bowl LVIII was nothing if not star-studded. Between appearances by Lana Del Ray, Ice Spice, and Blake Lively to the irresistible romantic subplot of Travis and Taylor, there’s no wonder it was the most watched telecast in history. But one celebrity feature has kept people buzzing long after the confetti (and memes) settled, in no small part because of how her appearance at the game changed.

Those who tuned in for the halftime show might remember Alicia Keys’ rough start to her performance. As one of headliner Usher’s on-stage guests, her initially cracking voice and off-key singing certainly proved that the performers weren’t lip-syncing. Now, though, people trying to re-watch recordings of the halftime show say they aren’t sure whether to believe their eyes and ears: The recording makes her sound totally fine. So what’s going on?

Alicia Off-Keys

Anyone who watched the Super Bowl halftime show heard it: The out-of-tune first notes in Alicia Keys’ song “If I Ain’t Got You” were cringe-inducing even for her biggest fans. The resulting slew of memes and tweets roasting the singer were proof that it was a sour note heard ‘round the world and one of audiences’ main takeaways from the halftime show. But you wouldn’t know it from the recordings. If you go back to videos of the moment, Keys sounds perfectly fine, which might leave you wondering whether you had a few too many cocktails in the second quarter. After all, as all the memes can testify, she totally messed up, didn’t she? Or was all of social media just imagining things?

No, it’s not the fans who are crazy here, but the gaslighting might go deeper than you think. In fact, the NFL’s official YouTube page now has a cleaned up version of the audio attached to the halftime show recording, auto-tuning Keys’ voice to make it sound like she really did hit the note with the help of AI editing. What’s more, YouTube is quickly scrubbing real videos of the audio at a rapid pace, leaving some viewers to wonder if they imagined the whole thing. News outlets and X users alike are now circulating the back-to-back recordings as quickly as the NFL tries to take them down:

Gaslighting and Gatekeeping

While a singer saving face is hardly anything to clutch pearls over, the fact that the NFL is somewhat successfully gaslighting fans into not believing their own ears is something we should be concerned about on a deeper level. Gone are the days of needing to add bleeps and blurred mouths to videos. With AI and other advancements in audiovisual editing, it’s becoming easier and easier to rewrite history. It’s only a matter of time until politicians successfully deep fake their way out of recordings we all heard them say, and without a sufficiently critical journalistic class to keep them honest, we’ll be left wondering if we can even trust our own eyes and ears.

While there’s a lot of talk about AI these days, one of the scariest applications is how convincingly it can make videos. Recordings used to be pretty fool-proof verification, but, as the NFL has shown, they can now make people question things they’ve seen live, or in extreme cases, be used to produce nonconsensual AI porn of women with devastating results. The technology itself is often developed for good purposes; for example, taking swear words out of movies or dubbing them in other languages more convincingly. Most people agree it would be great to be able to watch movies originally produced in foreign languages without the annoyance of watching poorly dubbed audio, but the same technology can be used to totally alter the content of what someone said.

Similarly, a lot of people have been using AI audio editing to make comedy videos with altered audio. By training an audio algorithm on recordings of someone’s voice, for example President Biden or Trump, programs make it possible to pretty convincingly make anyone you want say anything you want. But again, not all applications of the technology are as morally neutral. Scammers have begun using AI voice spoofing to fake the voices of people’s family members, pretending they’re in distress in order to get ransom from families. Even without meeting the person they’re spoofing, criminals can use video or audio recordings to reproduce someone’s voice so well that even their family members don’t realize it’s not real.

Fears and Freedoms

Phone scams and even fake nudes might seem like child’s play compared to what these tools can do in the hands of governments. Freedom House, a nonprofit dedicated to acting as a watchdog against authoritarianism, has been sounding the alarm about the effect of all this advanced editing on governments’ ability to lie to its citizens. In at least 22 countries, Freedom House says social media companies are already required to use AI for censorship, and at least 47 countries have been spotted using AI to directly manipulate online information, often outsourcing the work to contractors and other third parties to maintain plausible deniability. Last year in Pakistan, the former Prime Minister used generative AI to fake a video of a woman standing up to the military to show that women stood by him rather than the establishment regime. AI has also been used to show pro-Chinese Communist Party content via totally fake news stations like “Wolf News,” complete with totally fake news anchors, to spread propaganda to Americans.

Technological advancements are having the rapid impact they are thanks to the fact that so much content these days is purely digital, but the reaches of revisionist history have hit hard copies, too. Classic novelists like Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, and Ian Fleming are now having their work edited posthumously to remove language that, in today’s day and age, is considered offensive, meaning that even the books we read could change from one generation to the next – through no doing of the author’s. 

Closing Thoughts

It’s understandable that Alicia Keys wouldn’t want her bad note to live forever. After all, it’s got to be tough to have such a rough mistake recorded in HD ‘til the end of time. While it’s far less embarrassing than other Super Bowl slip-ups (lest we forget Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl nip slip, sadly for her, before AI editing was available), it’s hard to blame Keys for wanting to sound her best for the history books. At the same time, the lack of transparency from the NFL and the success they’ve had in getting the original recordings taken down from the Internet should make people cock an eyebrow at just how successful censorship can be. If the NFL is willing and able to successfully trick the largest audience in Super Bowl history, we should be even more concerned about the lengths to which authoritarian rulers could go – and in some cases are already going – to gain power and control.

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