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The Borrowed Song

February 10th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Czech ice dancers Kateřina Mrázková and Daniel Mrázek performed to AI-generated music during their Olympic debut. Their rhythm-dance program used a synthetic song described as a 1990s-style Bon Jovi track before moving into AC/DC's real recording of "Thunderstruck." Earlier versions of the AI song reproduced lyrics associated with New Radicals and Bon Jovi, a problem that followed the siblings to the ice, TechCrunch reported on February 10th.

The performance placed a lifetime of physical practice beside a machine's statistical imitation of popular music. The skaters had trained for the timing, lifts, and danger. The soundtrack arrived through a system trained on musical libraries and returned phrases that sounded familiar because familiarity was the material from which it was assembled. An Olympic routine depends on the authority of a chosen song, its history carried into a body moving under pressure. Here the music carried a different history, one that the model had absorbed without preserving authorship. The audience could watch an original athletic achievement while listening to a counterfeit memory of the 1990s, with the borrowed lyrics removed only after the resemblance became impossible to ignore.

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