The music video “From Napoli to Mars” has been released, serving as the first single from Giovanni Scafoglio‘s album “Musicology Mashup.” The work is a love letter to Naples, Scafoglio‘s hometown. The video, created entirely through the use of artificial intelligence, demonstrates the systematic copyright infringement involved in AI training. Although filters block explicit requests, the author proves that using brief, summary descriptions is enough for the algorithm to reproduce protected subjects. The experiment exposes the illegal assimilation of images and texts, including literary works destroyed during data processing.
Watch the official video for “From Napoli to Mars” via the YouTube player below:
— The Copyright Paradox and Generative AI —
With the track “From Napoli to Mars,” Scafoglio highlights a painful contemporary plague. Generative AIs, while claiming on the surface to protect copyright, conceal a fundamental flaw that is difficult to remedy: their entire training took place in complete violation of copyright. The video exposes the hypocrisy of current filters. If one were to explicitly ask an AI to generate a video featuring Grendizer (Goldrake) or David Bowie, the system would refuse. However, if the subjects are described summarily, without ever naming them, they appear in the footage—as indeed happens during the music video. The reason is structural: the models illegally assimilated those images during their learning phase. The same predatory mechanism was applied to literary works of art, graphic novels, and rare books, which were destroyed by the data processing sequence in total disregard of the authors’ rights.
“From Napoli to Mars” was born as an act of love towards his beloved Naples and the great figures who have loved it over the centuries.
A multifaceted city, Naples represents a true geography of the soul. For this reason, it has been loved by great artists, but also by great investigators of the unconscious and the human psyche, such as psychiatrist Théodore Flournoy and Carl Gustav Jung. In the music video, Scafoglio pays homage to the clinical essay “From India to the Planet Mars“, translating investigations into occult phenomena into a 1990s video game aesthetic. The space journey represents a descent into the subconscious in a trance-like state. The line “We relax in the intermediate spaces” indicates the liminal space between waking life and sleep—a dissociative condition necessary for repressed content to emerge in the form of visions or dreams. The references to Mars hark back to when Flournoy studied the alleged space travels and visions of Hélène Smith, which were also analyzed by Jung to understand the products of the unconscious.
Just as Flournoy deduced that the medium Hélène Smith‘s alien universe was the product of cryptomnesia, Scafoglio shapes Mars by reworking earthly memories. It is a game where the square-shaped spaceship and Martian encounters with Grendizer, David Bowie, and the demons of Doom are projections of deeply embedded Pop culture memories. Flying over Pompeii recalls Jung‘s archaeological metaphor, in which the buried city depicts the collective unconscious. Neapolitan ghosts take the form of archetypes and autonomous complexes. For the conscious mind to explore these depths, the black cat and the poet Virgil assume the role of psychopomps. Sirens and nymphs embody primordial energies. The appearance of Dracula, justified by the legend of his Neapolitan tomb, symbolizes the encounter with the Jungian shadow. Finally, the figures of Galileo, Mozart, Beethoven, and Maradona demonstrate how cultural references resurface during psychic dissociation.
“From Napoli to Mars” was written and composed by Giovanni Scafoglio and is the first single from the album “Musicology Mashup.”
Scafoglio also handled the programming required for the AIs to generate the music video. In the video, Scafoglio himself undertakes a space journey starting from Naples and heading to Mars in the company of his black cat. The music combines AI-generated tracks with real guitars. The song features vocals by Myouju and cello by Kurdish musician Hakan Barzani. Recording took place in studios located in the millennial undergrounds of Naples and Damascus.