Mimicked Voices and Nonhuman Listening: AI Deepfakes, Speech, and Sonic Manipulation in the Digital War on Ukraine
The essays collected in this series (link to the Introduction) trace how nonhuman listening operates through sound, speech, and platformed media across distinct but interconnected domains. Across these accounts, listening no longer secures meaning or relation; it becomes a site of contestation, where sound is mobilized, processed, and weaponized within systems that privilege circulation, recognition, and response over truth. In this contribution, Olga Zaitseva-Herz examines how nonhuman listening operates under conditions of war, where AI-generated voices and deepfakes destabilize the very grounds of auditory trust. Through the case of Ukraine, she shows how platforms and political actors alike exploit algorithmic listening systems to amplify affect, circulate disinformation, and transform voice into a tool of psychological warfare. Listening, in this context, becomes not a means of understanding but a terrain of uncertainty. –Guest Editor Kathryn Huether
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Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has unfolded as the most digitally mediated war to date, shaped not only by what circulates online but by how content is heard, interpreted, and amplified. Here, listening is not limited to human hearing: it also includes algorithmic systems that detect, rank, and amplify content, as well as political actors and online publics who interpret and recirculate it. Social media platforms—Telegram, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook—have become sites of psychological warfare where AI-generated audio, video, text, and image-based content are crafted to manipulate perception and provoke rapid emotional responses, often through algorithmic systems attuned to virality and affect. Ukrainian political authorities regularly caution users by saying that everything one reads, hears, or sees could be a psychological weapon. This is not rhetorical. Content is often designed to produce outrage, shock, and despair—emotions that travel quickly across platforms and influence public mood.
AI is used to create fake news videos, synthetic voices, and deepfake conversations, complicating how authenticity is heard and assessed. Some recordings circulating on social media simulate “leaked” phone calls revealing political dissent or strategic plans that are then shared on social media sites such as Telegram, Instagram, and Facebook. At the same time, the fact that people’s original voices can now also be generated with AI means that one can claim that their recorded voice is AI-generated. A widely circulated case involved Russian music producer Iosif Prigozhin, whose alleged call criticizing the Kremlin provoked significant backlash. Soon after he claimed the recording was an AI forgery – a statement whose truth remains unclear, but which strategically exploits growing public awareness of deepfakes as a means of discrediting or distancing from damaging material. Deepfakes thus do not merely deceive; they also destabilize the conditions of listening and trust, turning listening itself into a site of strategic uncertainty.. This uncertainty exploits a growing crisis of trust in listening itself, where voices can always be disavowed as synthetic. Against this backdrop, music and voice emerge as especially powerful media for manipulation, parody, retaliation, and symbolic struggle.
AI Songs as a Tool of Revenge
AI generative tools are also used for irony or parody, such as in the viral remake “Samotni Moskali,” [Lonely Muscovites], which mocks the Ukrainian pop star Ani Lorak, who moved to Russia. On November 13th, 2023, Ukrainian journalist and politician Anton Gerashchenko’s Telegram channel posted a video remake of Ani Lorak’s old song “Poludneva Speka” [Midday Heat], renamed “Samotni Moskali.” This video quickly went viral on social media. Her big hit from the ’00s has been remade into strongly pro-Ukrainian content, featuring clips from current frontlines to illustrate new lyrics generated by an AI voice engineered to closely mimic Lorak’s vocal timbre and affect. The parody relies on listeners recognition of her voice and affective style, while the imitation introduces a strong contentual shift between the original and synthetic lyrics.
This social media burst was a response to Ani Lorak’s claimed political neutrality in the context of Russia´s full-scale war against Ukraine, despite clear signs from her that supported Russia. These actions seemed aimed at revenge and at the same time, the public breakup of her Ukrainian fan base, showing the impact of her choices, while her Ukrainian audience felt betrayed. It led to many satirical memes, including AI-generated songs related to her stage persona, appearing on social media. Knowing that, under current Russian politics, she could get into trouble there if the government took the promoted `support´ for the Ukrainian army seriously. The revenge group went even further by creating a homepage called “Ani Lorak Foundation,” completely dedicated to fundraisers for the Ukrainian army, which is represented like Lorak’s own project where she showcases her support of Ukrainian battalions. Some military drones deployed by the Ukrainian side even ended up bearing stickers with the name of the “Ani Lorak Foundation.“ This case demonstrates how AI tools became instruments of public satire, sabotage and protest in the context of the current full-scale war.
AI Songs as a Weapon
During the full-scale invasion, Russia has been using AI-generated music as a weapon for propaganda and disinformation. In 2023, multiple songs in Ukrainian were created to disrupt Ukraine’s military mobilization efforts and went viral. One of these, the song “Mamo, Ia Ukhyliant” [Mother, I am a Draft Dodger], became particularly popular in a multitude of variations. Their circulation shows how platforms “listen” to wartime content through metrics of repetition, provocation, and affective intensity, amplifying messages not because they are true, but because they are likely to generate reaction and spread. These songs were algorithmically promoted on TikTok and successfully sparked a viral challenge aimed at undermining Ukraine’s mobilization in 2024 by encouraging Ukrainian men to evade the draft, flee, and party abroad instead. In return, Ukrainian intelligence has released an official statement that these songs are products of the Russian disinformation campaign.
This example shows how AI-generated songs are actively used as powerful tools of war, spreading political messages and influencing people’s political choices. Also, the fact that all these songs about draft evasion were released in Ukrainian highlights the goal of targeting Ukrainian men specifically, since Russian men usually don’t speak Ukrainian and therefore wouldn’t be affected by the content. Furthermore, the presence of a large number of these `draft dodger’ songs at the same time created the impression of widespread societal acceptance through repetition and algorithmic amplification. In this way, repetition itself became a signal of apparent legitimacy: the more frequently such content circulated, the more easily platforms and audiences could register it as evidence of broader consensus around draft evasion within Ukrainians.
AI Pictures on Facebook Mimicking Sound and Sonic Affect
Visual disinformation follows similar viral patterns. There has been a surge of AI-generated images with war-related content, often mimicking sound to intensify emotional impact and prompt affective listening by showing a screaming child amid the rubble or a crying soldier in a Ukrainian uniform, paired with a patriotic, pro-Ukrainian message that encourages interaction, such as a like or comment. Even without actual sound, such images solicit a kind of affective listening in which suffering is not literally heard but imagined, projected, and emotionally registered through visual cues. Meanwhile, although this truth-blurring pattern attracted significant attention among many Ukrainians, ironic counter-memes emerged, mocking its primitive approach.
According to warnings from the Ukrainian online security agency, these accounts aim to interact with pro-Ukrainian users, ultimately adding them as friends or followers. Then, when they build a large enough audience, they shift the type of content they share to pro-Russian. The strategy relies on gathering an audience that is specifically pro-Ukrainian, as they interact with images of crying soldiers or the suffering of the Ukrainian people at the front. In this sense, the filtering process functions as a form of nonhuman listening at the level of audience formation: platforms and account managers learn which publics respond to particular emotional cues, cultivate those publics through repeated engagement, and later redirect them toward different ideological content. This creates a filtering mechanism through which an initially pro-Ukrainian audience is gathered, profiled, and later ideologically redirected, alienating loyal followers while pulling political opinion in a more pro-Russian direction.
Pro-Russian AI Songs in Germany to weaken Support of Ukraine
In Germany, AI-generated songs are being utilized as propaganda tools to promote pro-Russian sentiment and anti-Ukrainian views. The right-wing party AfD has embraced AI songs as a potent tool in this regard. Multiple mostly anonymous YouTube accounts have emerged spreading right-wing ideas, with these songs not only addressing German political issues but also openly supporting Russia. For instance, one song titled “Meine Stimme Habt ihr nicht” [You don’t get my vote] features an AI-created avatar of a tall, strong woman holding German and Russian flags. The version of the same song was also released in Russian. The lyrics criticize Germany’s political course, including military aid to Ukraine, and expresses a desire to be friends with Russia. Its circulation across German and Russian suggests that listening is being calibrated for different national and linguistic publics, allowing similar political messages to be heard through distinct affective and ideological frames shaped by language, audience, and context.
Contemporary propaganda is increasingly shaped not just by human intent but by rapidly developing nonhuman listening systems—both in production and amplification. Algorithmic listening and perception are exploited to privilege what provokes, not what is true, complicating efforts to regulate digital hate, emotion, and influence. In this context, listening becomes not only a human practice of interpretation, but also a technical system of detection, ranking, and amplification—and, crucially, a site of failure where truth, trust, and perception can no longer be reliably aligned.
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Featured Image: Photo by Stanislav Vlasov on Unsplash.
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Olga Zaitseva-Herz is an ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of Ukrainian music, war, displacement, and digital culture. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Kule Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore at the University of Alberta and a guest scholar at Think Space Ukraine at the University of Regensburg. Her research examines how song operates as a medium of political mediation, cultural diplomacy, and historical memory, with a particular focus on popular music and AI-generated sound during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Combining perspectives from ethnomusicology, sound studies, and media analysis, her work investigates how music shapes narratives of resistance, belonging, and global visibility, and how sonic practices illuminate the broader entanglements of culture, technology, and power.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Hate & Non-Human Listening, an Introduction–Kathryn Huether
Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport—Michelle Pfeifer
Mapping the Music in Ukraine’s Resistance to the 2022 Russian Invasion—Merje Laiapea
SO! Amplifies: An Interactive Map of Music as Ukrainian Resistance to the 2022 Russian Invasion—Merje Laiapea
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“So Jao”: Sound, Death and the Postcolonial Politics of Cinematic Adaptation in Vishal Bhardwaj’s “Haider” (2014)
The beginning of this year witnessed a significant reportage on films inspired by the Kashmir conflict in India, occasioned by the release of Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files on March 11, 2022. The polarized reaction to the film, which single-mindedly focuses on the exodus of Kashmiri pandits from the valley and the violence they were subjected to at the hands of their Muslim counterparts, makes visible the complexity of the understanding of Kashmir’s political history in contemporary India. While Agnihotri’s film, whose propagandist agenda in favor of the state won approvals from the ruling political party in India, Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2014 film Haider, despite its extremely sensitive and responsible treatment of the problem of militancy in Kashmir was targeted for passing over the plight of Kashmiri pandits. But eight years after its release, Haider, which won five National Awards in 2015, still wields the power to move its audience regardless of their religious and communal bearings through its portrayal of a terrible human tragedy in the wake of Kashmir militancy in the 1990s.
Bharadwaj’s Haider completes his trilogy of cinematic adaptations of Shakespearian tragedies: Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet translate as Maqbool (2004), Omkara (2006), and Haider (2014) respectively, in their Bollywood avatars. Bhardwaj, in his unique style, imports the original tragic plots into an identifiable and contemporary Indian context, through the assimilation of the plot material with the personal life stories he tells in his films. The plot of Haider centers around the disappearance and death of Haider’s father, which exposes the dark menagerie of political corruption and murders that Haider’s uncle is embroiled in. The pursuit of this traumatic truth sets the stage for Haider’s alienation from his mother and the motherland.
Integral to Bhardwaj’s style is the use of music in a typical Bollywood blockbuster formula, with song and dance sequences interrupting the linearity of cinematic storytelling. While certain film adaptations of Shakespeare operate simply as vehicles for the transmissions of ideology, Graham Holderness argues in “Radical Potentiality and Institutional Closure” (published in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism), others “block, deflect or otherwise work on ideology in order partially to disclose its mechanisms.” Holderness evaluates the possibility of the film form to be a radical medium to challenge dominant ideologies or value systems. Analyzing Akira Kurosawa’s film adaptation of Macbeth—Throne of Blood (1957)–he argues in favor of the film’s dynamism to be able to liberate the original text.
Holderness’ reading of Kurosawa raises important questions for the postcolonial film importing from the English literary canon to speak uniquely to a postcolonial audience. In Bhardwaj’s undertaking, this import is singularly anchored and strengthened in a powerful musical idiom. Instead of containing the meanings of the original text, Bhardwaj’s Haider expands and pluralizes the levels of signification that Hamlet produces. By making the stock Hamlet plot be the medium for staging the tragic history of Kashmir, Bhardwaj’s film is a direct address, on one level, to the former imperial master discourse. On a more immediate and radical level, the film hits back very strategically at the Indian state and the numerous killings that have been sanctioned in the name of controlling terrorism in the recent past. In this capacity, the film liberates the textual Hamlet, making its echoes reverberate in a new sound and a new linguistic register.
Through a strategic integration of dance and music–both diegetic (within the frame of the film) and non-diegetic (for the audience’s listening only)– Bhardwaj’s film not only succeeds in delivering its radical political message to a popular film audience, it also speaks back to the former imperial discourse. Non-musical sounds are also key to Haider (2014) as a careful sonic anchoring of the story. The abstract potential of musical and non-musical sounds open up new horizons of meaning in the film, exceeding the confines of the original verbal register of the literary text. The loud, blaring and constant sound of the army car’s horn, for example, signals the death of Hilal in the beginning scenes of the film triggering the tragic plot. The unsettling tones of despair, melancholia and death which open the film remain a haunting and pervasive presence throughout.
“Jhelum” the song that sings the lament of Hilal’s tragic loss, invokes the river that passes through the valley. The song describes the elemental quality of the river into whose womb-like depths Hilal’s body receded till it was posthumously discovered by villagers. The fading melancholic melody of the song seems to suggest the slow disintegration of Haider’s sanity, as he is seen staring into blankness in several shots as well as attempting to merge with the river in an act of suicide. The opening sounds evoke a song that comes later in the narrative, “Bismil,” that stands in place of the play within a play sequence in Hamlet and expands the affective reach of the themes of death, love and betrayal.
One of the most intriguing moments in the film is the musical rendition of the gravedigger scene, an archetypal commentary on human mortality in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Performed by three old men in a snow-covered graveyard in conspicuously tired voices, the song “So Jao” (“Sleep!”) has a deceptively bare and sparse quality. The song opens with the rough, scratching of the gravedigger’s shovel scraping the cold hard ground, a sound that becomes the acoustic base for the bizarre lullaby-like deathsong. The choppy, staccato-like rhythmic impact of the metal on the resistant icy ground announcing “the final rest” is executed with a disturbing sonic clarity and certitude. This gritty foreground sound is supported by the reverberating sound of the rubab that transports the tune from an immediate closed verse recitation into an expanded musical interlude, as the vocals echo “Arey ao na…!” (O come…!) stretching the last syllable into a dying, falling note. “So Jao“‘s loaded simplicity dispassionately delivers this bare truth: that all life is inevitably moving towards its end, or as Freud says in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) towards its inanimate origin.
While the men who perform “So Jao” are past their prime in life, they are far from being incidental characters in the film as they are in Shakespeare. They are woven into the narrative as militants who protect Haider and do not hesitate to wield heavy duty weapons when the time comes. It comes as no surprise that they are digging their own graves, even as the seriousness and fear of death are subsumed in the larger political cause they serve in the plot. The sound of the shovel overlaps with Gazala’s first phone call to Roohdaar, the embodied ghost who brings Hamlet’s father’s message to the son (the Urdu word rooh literally translates as soul or spirit), signifying an ominous anticipation in the narrative at this point. The grave, as the song says, is ultimately where you sleep your longest sleep. The scene is one of the three men lying supine each in his own hole, with one in the center housing the little boy who enters the frame perkily dancing into the gray and barren scene. His sprint-like entry walk carrying bread and sustenance for the gravediggers, the well-choreographed lifting of his body to the beat of the song heightened just very slightly by the clinking bell sound once every four beats is an unsettling reminder of the happy ignorance that we immerse ourselves in being simultaneously aware and oblivious of the inevitable imminent end. These stark juxtapositions in the gravedigger’s song works as a telling sonic metaphor for the state of hopelessness, confusion and despair that has historically assailed Kashmir for many, many decades. The song is also a commentary on the futility of violence instigated in the name of religion, when man must ultimately surrender to one common fate, one common remainder.
Haider’s presence in the graveyard song introduces the inevitable vectors of vengeance and death that awaits his fate following the knowledge of the truth of his father’s institutional murder. The further breakdown of his psyche and the increasing dissociation from his world is dramatized brilliantly in the song “Bismil” that publicly calls out Khurram on his crime (1.44.59). The song marries the allegorical with folk costumes, and incorporates exaggerated and physically intense dance steps to impose the serious weight and inescapable gravity of the accusation of murder that Haider ascribes to Khurram. The song and dance sequence are staged as a public performance, one that happens a few scenes before in the film too, when Haider is seen surrounded by a crowd in a new avatar with shaved head and grown beard (1.25.53). This distinct change in appearance along with the masques he uses later in Ghazala’s wedding (1.40.51) and the “Bismil” song are markers of Haider’s increasing dissociation from his absurd reality—one that he can only make sense of as a character in a play. Khurram’s crimes are not separate from the questionable workings of the Indian state, and Bhardwaj does a good job tapping into the folk idiom and the song-and-dance format to critique what Haider calls the state’s “chutzpah” (pronounced tʃəʊzpə, not ˈho͝otspə), the infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). The alteration of the first syllable is possibly to bring in an echo of a popular north Indian abuse word to take a jab at the impunity enjoyed by state officials for the crimes committed on the Kashmiri people.
Haider remains a brave directorial undertaking not only aesthetically but also politically, given that the issue of Kashmir’s independence (azadi) is still a burning issue in India 27 years since 1995, the year in which Haider is set, and 8 years since the film’s release. Bharadwaj’s self-composed music in the film is not simply a placeholder for the dazzling verbal exchanges of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The music in Haider magnifies and intensifies the local mood of the scenes where they feature. This function is not only limited to the background soundtrack which, in its haunting atmospheric quality, renders a hollow despair and anguished hopelessness throughout. The songs additionally step in to carry the expression beyond the register of words and visuals to render a poetic and sonic intensity to the film, making it more memorable and impactful to a wider audience. In Haider, the formula of the Bollywood blockbuster film is effective not only as good entertainment, but also as a means to tie the story together in a haunting soundscape which refuses to fade long after the film ends.
Featured image: screen capture from Haider created by SO!
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Abhipsa Chakraborty is a PhD candidate in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo. She holds a BA, MA and MPhil from the Department of English, University of Delhi, and has worked as an Assistant Professor (Ad-hoc) at University of Delhi. Her research interests include Modernism, Sound Studies, Digital Humanities, and South Asian cultures. She is a trained vocalist in Hindustani Classical Music and hopes to integrate her musical knowledge with her academic research on aurality and narrative styles in 20th-century novels.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Gendered Soundscapes of India, an Introduction“–Monika Mehta and Praseeda Gopinath
“Out of Sync: Gendered Location Sound Work in Bollywood“—Priya Jaikumar
Sonic Connections: Listening for Indigenous Landscapes in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles–Laura Sachiko Fugikawa
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