Here are our favorites.
DJ Roomba
Google’s AI lab built an AI system that automatically writes song lyrics, and it’s dropping straight banger after banger. Give the algorithm an opening line, the MIT Technology Review reported, and it'll get right to work. Check out what it did with “I’m your big and brave and handsome Romeo”
I'm your big and brave and handsome Romeo
you know my secret secret
you have my second estate
you suit your high origin
you have my cursed youth
you have my life
Iconic, right?
Mr. Roboto
In a research paper published to the preprint server ArXiv on Monday, two Google scientists lay out how they trained a neural network to write new songs. They fed the neural net with the lyrics of thousands of songs — anything from country to metal — as well as 13 classic novels like Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” to help boost the system’s vocabulary.
The actual songs aren't that impressive — let’s look at two other songs that started with that Romeo line but didn’t come out as spectacularly:
I’m your big and brave and handsome Romeo
I’m the man of the woods, I’m the man of the woods.
I’m the man of the woods, I’m the woods
I’m the man of the woods, I’m the woods
I’m the man of the woods, I’m the woods
I’m the man of the woods, I’m the woods
And then there's this guaranteed classic:
I’m your big and brave and handsome Romeo
You, and I’ll tell you all about it
I don’t
Understand you,
Said the young man, and we
Shall be happy to-day
Songbird of a Generation
What is impressive about these songs is that, at the very least, the sentences generally follow some kind of logic. That’s not to say that an endless loop of being a man of the woods makes any kind of sense, but at least subjects, verbs, and objects more or less line up.
The nonsense factor of these new songs shouldn't be surprising, because an algorithm that genuinely comprehends language and converses is still a distant scientific pipe dream, currently unattainable with modern technology.
Okay, fine, let’s have one more bop.
You told me you loved nobody else, you never would
you told me you wanted everything else, you never would
he put his hand on the pillow of the marquis
he put his cap on the ground like a stone
he put his hand on the latch of a door
he put his key in the lock as a key
That one, at least, brought a tear to my eye.
READ MORE: These awful AI song lyrics show us how hard language is for machines [MIT Technology Review]
More on AI writing: Was That Script Written By A Human Or An AI? Here’s How To Spot The Difference.
Share This Article