YouTube Made A Never-Ending Music Video For Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy"

Technology and AI get more cutting-edge with each passing day. And for what purpose? To give you an endless string of Billie Eilish covers of her massive hit "Bad Guy." The song's music video recently passed one billion views, and its journey toward the milestone came with another milestone: "Bad Guy" is also one of the most-covered songs in YouTube history. The platform is celebrating the double whammy milestone with a new AI experiment, calling it "the world's first infinite video," which uses programming software to recognize song structure and weave together a never-ending and randomized super cover of the hit.

If the idea feels too big to comprehend, let the YouTube blog break it down for you: “To create this experience, Google Creative Lab had to perfectly align the audio from thousands of videos with different tempos, instruments, keys, and styles. Conventional algorithms couldn’t do the trick alone, so we turned to machine learning. For videos that deviated from the original track — like acoustic or a capella versions — we built a neural network that could predict matches between covers and the original. With this data, we were able to line up all kinds of different covers and switch seamlessly between them.”

The cover categories are expansive; a listener might catch a cover including heavy metal, rubber chicken noises, a cappella, American Sign Language, and more. With over 10.5 million seconds of content and 1.46 x 10^100 years of video combinations, YouTube says it's impossible to experience the same cover sequence twice. The experience is so technologically demanding that it couldn't be hosted on YouTube proper and has to live on its own microsite, billie.withyoutube.com. Give it a whirl, and get a sense of the video, below.