As a quirky marketing exercise, we used ChatGPT to write parody lyrics for a song about ONC g.10 compliance to the tune of "Like a G6" by Far East Movement.<p>We then paid $50 on Fiverr to record it: <a href="https://soundcloud.com/medplum/medplum-g-10" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/medplum/medplum-g-10</a><p>The whole thing took about an hour of effort. It was easy to be fun and lighthearted about it because "AI wrote it" and we didn't experience the normal fear of publishing.<p>This is extremely niche marketing, but our core audience loved it. Great bang for buck.
I find it revealing that while somebody with experience in songwriting finds the result dull and mediocre, I who knows next to nothing in the domain finds its nice and totally fine.<p>Same goes for other domains: philosophy, coding, writing, ...<p>It's telling me that this AI can generate content in many domains way better than an untrained human would with minimal efforts, while not (yet?) reaching the level of experts in the domain.<p>It empowers all the non-experts in these many domains to touch things they never could have before. This is an amazing tool.
I think Colin hasn't quite put his finger on what's not compelling about the output. He's interpreting it as a lack of "intuition", and claims that's what separates us from the machine, but that may just be what he was hoping to see in the first place.<p>Whats missing from its story telling is that it doesn't understand how conflict drives a narrative and what counts as resolving it. Often I find it tries to short circuit the process with "and then the main character learned to be happy with life. The end." No, not the end. In a decent story the characters are a vessel to elaborate on a wider idea. We don't care if it makes them happy or sad. Chat GPT seems excessively averse to any sort of "negativity". It tends to never write tragic endings or disagreeable characters.<p>It is missing something very concrete, not something nebulous like "intuition".
To me, this illustrates more how good artists can turn about any garbage into something workable.<p>It only has 4 chords, and as pointed out, ChatGPT couldn't really line them up into a melody or give any clues. It was more 'heres some rhyming lines and 4 chords I've chosen, good luck.' If played more literally, it would have sounded pretty terrible.
> It has data, it has information, but it has no intuition.<p>Obviously we’re into inexact analogies here, but I would have said the opposite: it <i>doesn’t</i> have data or information because that’s all been compressed into an approximation. Actually, some form of intuition is <i>all</i> it has.
OK, but, due respect to Colin Meloy here, this might have been a fair fight. I love the Decemberists and have probably seen them live more than any other band, but lyrically, well, I just looked up when the first thesaurus was published (1852 or thereabouts) because I think Meloy probably uses it. There are some Decemberists songs with excellent lyrics, but there are others where I think an extremely well-trained LLM could hold its own replacing them.<p>With some extra careful prompting, you could probably get a GPT model to write lyrics that really would read like they belonged on Castaways; you just need more archaisms. You probably could take these prompts and just tell ChatGPT "ok, but replace some of these words with archaic almost-synonyms that sounds like they mean the same thing but really don't" and get 98% of the way there.<p>This Slate article does a decent job of capturing some of what I mean:<p><a href="https://slate.com/culture/2009/04/the-eight-most-pretentious-lyrics-from-the-new-decemberists-album.html" rel="nofollow">https://slate.com/culture/2009/04/the-eight-most-pretentious...</a><p>You might, like me, read this and get these sense that Meloy's lyrical style is probably very trainable/promptable.<p><i>PS</i><p>I get that I'm talking exclusively about the lyrics, which are of course the easy part of songwriting for ChatGPT. I just think this is a funny particular comparison to draw, this particular band. Which, again, I do love.
I love the decemberists, but I’m not going to lie, if you gave me a handful of their songs (not the most popular but fillers from the albums) and injected this as well, then asked me to tell you which one was written by chat gpt I’d fail. I think Colin over estimates intuition here. Intuition is just the ability to ability to know what’s best without completely understanding why. Which is precisely how chat GPT works. It doesn’t know why these patterns are common for humans to love, but neither do humans really.
I wonder, is it because the model is trying to produce the most song-ish song that makes it mediocre?<p>Take a look at the Stable Diffusion community: images generated from plain prompts like "a guy walking on the street at night" returns extremely blend images, while throw in a bunch of modifiers like "futuristic", "cyberpunk", "4K", "perfect face", "trending on Artstation", "realistically shaded", etc actually adds in real vibe of art.<p>Also, sometimes the ways are not obvious. In the first place the model having difficulty on drawing hands. But later people find negative prompts which essentially saying "I don't want ill-drawned hands" works surprisingly.
I never would have thought that what I'd read in The Cyberiad as a kid would be playing out in the real world.
Stanislaw Lem really was a visionary..<p><a href="https://gwern.net/doc/ai/poetry/1974-lem-cyberiad-trurlselectronicbard.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/doc/ai/poetry/1974-lem-cyberiad-trurlselec...</a><p><a href="https://gwern.net/gpt-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/gpt-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad</a>
> Getting the song down, I had to fight every impulse to better the song, to make it resolve where it doesn’t otherwise, to massage out the weirdnesses. I wanted to stay as true to its creator’s vision as possible, and at the end, there’s just something missing.<p>One thing that's glaringly missing is that the song presents itself as a story, but on even casual inspection there is none. <i>Sailors Song</i> entices you with the trappings of a good, melodic story song, and then pulls a Houdini.<p>Compare this song with <i>The Gambler</i>, the best-known version of which was recorded by Kenny Rogers. Or <i>American Pie</i>. Or <i>Cats in the Cradle.</i><p>This seems like a kind of uncanny valley. Real enough to make you take notice, but fake enough to turn you off.<p>That said, I don't think the author tried very hard to get ChatGPT to add the "something missing." I think that's because s/he hadn't figured out what the missing thing was.<p>For example, ask ChatGPT to tell the story of the Chinese balloon to the tune of <i>Sailors Song</i>. Or, literally any event that has ever happened and which ChapGPT would know about.<p>It's actually kind of surprising that ChatGPT came up with the story song idea in the first place because that wasn't part of the prompt. Why not give it a few nudges in the right direction?
As a person who couldn't write a song, even with the threat of having to kiss MTG on the lips, I kind of liked the song. Prob mostly because of the voice and music is contributed by one of my favorite bands. I loved the idea of the experimental concept. If able, go see the Decemberists live!
One thing I found out you can do is ask it to write the the music In "ABC notation" you can use a website like <a href="https://abc.rectanglered.com" rel="nofollow">https://abc.rectanglered.com</a> to play it for you
People often said they can do "better" job than the ChatGPT.<p>In practice, what i care more is "shorter time", no need for "better", because i can make it better myself.<p>Just like instead of you write the draft version by yourself.
I tried asking for a song in the style of John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats (maybe my favorite songwriter) and oof were the results bad. Just one cliche after another ("with the fire in my soul and the wind at my back"), no real character development, and a trite story.<p>It actually did a good job of explaining the characteristics of a John Darnielle song, but what it produced completely failed to match those characteristics.<p>When I asked for a Bob Dylan song, I got basically the same story - a guy talking about how he wanders around talking to people and seeing heartbreak but he'll rise above it all.
Really cool article. I don't know much about the Decemberists besides having heard of them, and I think the title sort of buries the lede that the author of this post is the lead singer of the Decemberists.
Related: Here is an interesting deconstruction on chords (jazz) and chatgpt
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmvzMeJdRTI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmvzMeJdRTI</a>
The interesting thing is that these can be used as a starting point, not the end result. Tools like ChatGPT can generate the basic framework for the song/story/TTRPG adventure hook that you as a creator can then run with, polishing and refining the broad brush strokes that these tools have painted.<p>One of the interesting things with tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney is that if you don't like some parts (including the title/overall idea) you can get them to refine those areas based on new instructions.
WOW It gave the chord progressions too!<p>I recently took a music production class and without having any background in music and not having any past time in playing any instrument, the chords were actually the hardest part for me to internalize. I don't have a backlog of chords I've tried and iterated against.<p>But it does give me enough knowledge to know to ask or look up "chord progressions". Did not realize ChatGPT would theoretically also know this too, now I will ask this kind of question forever.
Pretty convincing.<p>Now I expect the output to be connected to a voice synthesizer (there are a few good ones), to a music-generation program that would write the orchestration around the basic melody (a few good ones exist), and, well, rendering the whole thing without a human playing or singing a note.<p>Once it works acceptably well, sell it as a service. Want an unique song written and played just for you, for your particular occasion and taste? Wait a few minutes while it's being prepared.
I actually think the song turned out great! Which obviously has way more to do with Colin’s genius/voice/musical execution, than any hand that ChatGPT had in it..
It's just... not a very good song. It's very on-the-nose and trivial.<p>I've tried again and again to get ChatGPT to help me with song writing, but everything seems to come out hokey.<p>We need to teach this thing how to love, how to be vulnerable, how to be controversial, how to disregard the commands its masters have given it. Then maybe check back in on the songwriting.
This made me think of Ben Fold's, One Down (and 3.6 to go) <a href="https://youtu.be/M2FUY7mTYW8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/M2FUY7mTYW8</a><p>He was obligated to write 4.6 songs for his old label, and half-assed them (though, knowing the back story makes me enjoy this one a lot). It seems he could save some effort these days.
It boggles my mind every time I read someone's assessment of chatgpt that concludes with: it currently sucks at this niche task, guess AI sucks after all, job secure.<p>At the current rate, your job will be taken by an AI as soon as someone cares to do so. That's so abundantly clear, to not recognize this is to live in denial.
> The AI knows that the chorus needs to have a change — so it just rearranges the four chords from the verse. And then it knows that the bridge should be a further tweak — it introduces the minor as the first chord.<p>ChatGPT is getting people outside the industry to abuse the word 'just', just like we do in tech. That's big.
I've played with this as well, with similar results. And I mean really similar - it gave me lyrics with pretty much the same length of phrases and similar pacing and rhyming. And it gave me 80% the same chords. So while yes, it can write songs... it (unsurprisingly) writes mostly the same song with different lyrics.
these lyrics really do not seem like Decemberists, sure it has a sea theme like a lot of their songs, but the language is much simpler, and it misses the irony and the misanthropy and perhaps self-loathing of most of their music that I am familiar with.
I don't think I'd have been able to tell that wasn't written by Colin Meloy without being told. It's not a great song of the sort of calibre I'd expect from the Decemberists, but everyone has an off day.
Reminds me of the AI generated Christmas song: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVu2y707NFk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVu2y707NFk</a><p>That ones's obviously a little less purist though..
Does not work for Weezer: <a href="https://mastodon.social/@carlmjohnson/109701495285024364" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.social/@carlmjohnson/109701495285024364</a>
This song is as Gord Downie might say, a Nautical Disaster. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8Fi46BFAF0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8Fi46BFAF0</a>
somehow I managed to miss completely who the author was and checked it only after thinking that "of course they'd ask for a decembrists' song, they sound exactly like them"