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.