Danny Bones is pretty good for a young, white, working-class rapper. Last time I checked, his lead single was nearing 500,000 Spotify streams, with 29,000 monthly listeners, and the clips had been viewed a combined nearly three million times on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.
The main problem I have with Danny Bones, however, is that Danny Bones doesn’t exist. Danny Bones is an AI character created by an opaque outfit called the Node Project, which used artificial intelligence to construct the ideal, authentic, white “boy” rapper. It was designed knowing that it would be seen as more credible to this audience than a politician or a mainstream news outlet, giving their grievances a face, a rhythm and a working-class voice. The far right can still take to the streets, as we have seen once again with the riots in Belfast. But it’s also finding new and sneaky ways to draw attention to itself.
So what does an imaginary man represent? Bones raves about immigration, national decline and a Britain he says has been surrendered by its own leaders. In his most played song, “This Is England,” he leads a crowd of men holding St. George’s Crosses, fists in the air. In another, he wears black clothes with “mass expulsion units” on the back. In a third, an Asian man says, “We’re here,” and Bones replies, “Not for long.” The targets are the predictable ones: immigrants, Muslims and the supposedly managed decline of white men. Annoyingly, the songs are smoother than most AI music, the videos are flashy enough to grab attention; Danny himself is carefully constructed, with believable imperfection. (Acne scars? Or bottle scars from street fights? Hard to say.)
It is also, it turns out, available for rent. As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed, the Node Project was paid by Advance UK – Ben Habib’s increasingly right-wing Reform party – to produce a video about the Gorton and Denton by-elections. A montage of Anglo-Saxon warriors, World War II nostalgia-bait, combined with the Beatles crossing Abbey Road, under the slogan “a culture worth protecting”, the video was viewed around a quarter of a million times. Is this the first time a registered British political party has paid an AI influencer to make its campaign material? However, it didn’t really work. The Greens took Gorton and Denton, and Mr Bones spent the fallout hammering home that the winning campaign had “campaigned in Urdu and Bengali, not a Union Jack in sight”.
However, welcome to the hate economy. Within hours of the Bureau’s exposure, the Node Project had monetized the coverage: a £100 Founding Member tier, a £20 tier, a donation link, and “YooKay,” a new and even more extreme song. Not to miss out on the fun, here comes the parade of crypto-speculators (unrelated to Node) to spin a Danny Bones coin. Spotify confirmed that the songs were eligible to earn streaming royalties. Brilliantly, throughout all of this, Elon Musk’s AI engine Grok was advising X users that Danny Bones was “a real person – not an AI”.
This week, Bones is campaigning in Makerfield. On this occasion, he has come out for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, posting videos pitting a sold-out, elitist champagne-fuelled Nigel Farage against a tough, no-nonsense Lowe – and, rather, widening the divide between Reform and Restoration in the comments sections. Bones is cheap, though, and it’s effective and fast – all those pesky little things that we on the other side tend to struggle with. But we have one thing he doesn’t: coherence. His talking points about flag nationalism, fantasy of military deportation, and montages of World War II nostalgia are all undermined by the contradictory aesthetic AI has chosen for him.
The Node Project’s AI built a perfect mold of a far-right rapper, but whatever style of music it chose for it Superman it is a brilliant international heritage, excitingly mixed and – where it counts – historically anti-fascist. He picked up drum-and-bass below the beat (a genre built out of Jamaican sound system culture and black British innovation), a stab at UK workout behavior (again, a diasporic-tinged youth movement), then a passing visit to CBGB and the Roxy to pick up some punk credentials (if only Joe Strummer and Poly Strummer could attest to that). Put a gun to my head and make me pick a favorite Danny Bones video? It has to be where he lists Britain’s “good times”: a found montage of D-Day (an international coalition assembled to defeat fascism), fashion (whose sound came directly from black American R&B, soul and even Jamaican bluebeat), punks (Buzzcocks: “Should you ever fall in love with a pirate and fall in love with the radio? a line-up of some of the most multicultural movements, with international roots that Great Britain has produced, most of them with an anti-racist voice.
It seems that every musical reference that AI managed to build the top of her right wing comes from a record collection generously gifted to her by Britain’s borrowed heritage. The Node Project has collected Danny Bones precisely from the lineage and lineage a true Danny Bones would, in fact, despise, fear, and seek banishment. It is built by the very culture it claims to be protecting Britain from. The Node Project may have inadvertently created the best distillation of 50 years of British culture we’ve ever heard. Change the text and let’s see. The music that a real Danny Bones would make would be simple singing, tight male choirs, a fiddle and tabor and a sheep horn belligerently blown in a dark wood at night.
Unfortunately, these mental gymnastics don’t seem to matter much. A recent analysis of the 2025 German and Dutch elections found that the emotional impact of AI content persists even when people correctly identify it as AI-generated, even with a transparency label attached. You can know the video is fake and still feel exactly what it is designed to make you feel. However, credibility and coherence are not the essence of a six-second vertical TikTok video. Repetition, gut feeling, and emotional response make work that once took much longer. This is the oblique paradox Danny’s owners are playing with: the content doesn’t need to be believed to work, and now that the barrier to entry has collapsed, the area can be flooded. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism knocked down similar stylistic songs in minutes using readily available tools. What used to take months now takes an afternoon.
Danny Bones’ entire project is generative artificial intelligence in miniature, a working example of context-free association traps. He assembles fragments he doesn’t understand into an object that, at first glance, seems useful but, on closer inspection, is the wrong thing to a rather surprising degree: diaspora music wrapped around a nationalist avatar. HE has no concept of what an Amen beat, Sleng Teng or a “Funky Drummer” means; doesn’t understand 808s, 1210s, telecasters, or theremins, just that the commitment historically associated with these ones and zeroes is likely to be high. This blindness to meaning is how these models work, and it carries over to almost everything users ask AI to gather for them.
Only an artificial intelligence would have the temerity to construct a white nationalist persona entirely out of black, international, anti-fascist culture. Every genre the Node Project co-opts is the culture it claims Britain needs to protect. Take a look at Danny’s skirt and you’ll find a jumbled mess of half-formed ideas, incoherent associations, and imperfect memories, all packaged under a shiny fake fur coat. When I was organizing for Love Music Hate Racism, the neo-Nazi band Blood & Honor would come and find us on the road. Now all they need is a 20-quid AI subscription and a half-decent phone.
Ned Mendez is the head of research, insights and counter-disinformation at 411. Previously, he was a national organizer for Love Music Hate Racism. He writes the weekly End Hits newsletter on AI, politics and fraud infrastructure.
(Further reading: Violence in Belfast, Britain’s fury)
