There’s no arguing that Willie Nelson is one of the greatest figures in the history of country music. He helped create the outlaw country counterculture back in the 1960s in the face of the musical homogenization that the Nashville labels were pushing; he’s also been as iconoclastic and outspoken about his political beliefs and advocacy for causes like biofuels, marijuana law reform, the ethical treatment of horses, and gay rights

It’s also true that the country star just turned 92 years old earlier this year; he celebrated his 90th with a Hollywood Bowl concert of epic proportions. He’s the last surviving founding member of the outlaw country supergroup the Highwaymen – Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash both passed away in the early ’00s, and we lost Kris Kristofferson in September of last year – and for all his enduring cultural legacy, it makes sense that he might be feeling his age.

Willie Nelson’s Return To The Outlaw Music Festival Was Brilliant, But Nowhere Near The Emotional Moment Social Media Claims

The King Of Outlaw Country Gave As Strong A Performance As Ever

It is true that Willie Nelson is headlining the Outlaw Music Festival this year, and that his appearance there is something worth celebrating. As a longtime hero of outlaw country, Nelson has played the festival numerous times over the years, but in 2024 he was forced to withdraw from it at the last minute due to health issues, possibly related to a COVID-19 infection from back in 2022. Nelson having recovered enough to return to the festival circuit is a triumph, both for him personally and for the legions of fans left disappointed by last year’s cancellation.

There are a lot of great songs in country music, but these have yet to receive the recognition they deserve, even from some well-known artists.

Yet while Willie was in top form on May 13, for the festival’s opening night in Phoenix, Arizona, there was no eight-minute standing ovation for him at the end of his set. The crowd was certainly lively and appreciative, but there’s not a single direct account or video of the end of the set that corroborates the claim I saw going viral just last week.

There’s not a single direct account or video of the end of the set that corroborates the claim I saw.

The facts are, to be blunt, nowhere near so click-worthy. Nelson closed his set out with a relatively subdued performance of “Last Leaf,” a Tom Waits song that Nelson had covered on his 2024 release Last Leaf on the Tree. So where, then, did this rumor about a massive outpouring of audience affection come from?

The Viral Post About Willie Nelson’s Emotional Response Traces Back To A Sourceless Facebook Account Using AI-Generated Images

Social Media Continues To Be A Petri Dish For The Multitude Of Cancerous Growths That We Inaccurately Call “Generative AI”

The earliest citation for this supposed event is a May 22 post from a Facebook account named Beautiful Country Memories. The above image is a screenshot of the post – and if you look closely, you’ll see that the crying Willie Nelson in the forefront of the image just doesn’t look quite right.

The latest case of a self-publisher caught using AI is just one headline in a trend that has alarming repercussions for the most vulnerable writers.

6

For a long time, the concept of the Uncanny Valley was used to describe the gap between a representation of a real human face and the often-unsettling results of various forms of 3D modeling to attempt to recreate the same. It was a major topic of discussion throughout the ’90s and ’00s in particular, as video games and movies both struggled to get digital models of people to appeal to viewers instead of confound them. Now that generative AI systems can create near-perfect facsimiles of real people, it’s a concept we need to re-familiarize ourselves with.

The AI technologies employed by many, including law enforcement, can discriminate against minorities and add to systemic racism, if not addressed.

That crying Willie – to say nothing of the numerous similar-but-not-the-same ones seen on the other Facebook posts above, discussing the same supposed moment – is a fake. The closer you look at it, the more you can tell that there’s something innately off about the lines on his face, the lighting, even the shine of the tears on his cheeks. There’s also no video of the moment, or any photographs other than the close-ups of Willie at the microphone – and notably, the extant footage of the concert shows that Willie was actually sitting down, not standing as the pictures imply.

I, like the supposed hundreds of thousands of others who reacted, shared, or commented on these posts, fell for something that was either the hallucination of a generative AI, or just an outright lie.

The long and the short of it is that the supposed eight-minute standing ovation and the various supposedly heart-wrenching moments of vulnerability Nelson and his fellow musicians had on that stage never happened. I, like the supposed hundreds of thousands of others who reacted, shared, or commented on these posts, fell for something that was either the hallucination of a generative AI, or just an outright lie meant to drive web traffic.

Although The Anecdote Was An Exaggeration, Willie Nelson Still Deserves All Our Love

More Importantly, Willie Nelson Deserves Genuine Human Praise And Affection, Not Hallucinated Nonsense Meant Only To Drive Website Impressions

With a career that began in 1956, Nelson has been a part of country music’s greatest moments throughout the last century and well into this one. He helped push the genre’s boundaries, especially as he and Waylon Jennings forged the idea of outlaw country in the face of a recording industry that demanded conformity to an increasingly banal standard. That honestly makes it all the more frustrating and sickening that he’s the one who was co-opted by generative AI slop in hopes of driving clicks to some useless, spam-ridden website.

Toei Animation’s AI controversy has sparked even more discussion about whether or not the use of AI in anime is acceptable and the right move.

Imagine a world where I hadn’t taken the time to check my sources, and instead just took the words I saw on Facebook as gospel, cranked out another thousand words of my own about it, and posted them here, on one of the most sprawling culture-writing websites. If I didn’t have a modicum of professional integrity – to say nothing of my years in academia, learning just how important citations are to preserving the integrity of knowledge – I could’ve had a potentially viral article on my hands. But that would also have been ethically reprehensible (as well as potential libel).

In a world where media literacy is in the midst of swan-diving off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote, we all need to take a few extra minutes before sharing articles…

Willie Nelson deserves an eight-minute standing ovation from an audience that truly loves him. But the rest of us deserve an Internet where we don’t have to second-guess everything we see or read thanks to AI slop literally working in overdrive to poison the well of collective human knowledge. In a world where media literacy is in the midst of swan-diving off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote, we all need to take a few extra minutes before sharing articles, no matter how feel-good they might be, to make sure we aren’t further perpetuating the problem.