Shredding Bots
AI chatbot sidekick ChatGPT has done it again.
Thirteen-year-old guitarist Ava Toton asked the tool to “write a guitar solo” — and the results, as demonstrated in a short clip, didn’t disappoint. The musician turned simple, AI-generated guitar tab notations into a brain-searing solo.
But should ChatGPT really get all the credit? According to Toton’s experience at least, that’s a definite no.
As has been the case ever since OpenAI released its blockbuster chatbot, the humans behind the prompts still have to put in a lot of leg work to get satisfying results.
In other words, ChatGPT isn’t going to magically start replacing rock guitarists on stage anytime soon — but it can be an impressive jumping-off point for human/AI collaboration.
AI Solo
It took quite a while for Toton to get to something even remotely resembling a guitar solo.
“Fun thing I decided to do with ChatGPT to test how well it handles musical requests — it took forever to finally get it to give me a usable answer!” Toton wrote in a Reddit thread. “ChatGPT gave me the notes, but I interpreted them, like the lengths, and what to accentuate. I also wrote the rhythm guitar, harmonies, bass, and drums.”
In fact, “ChatGPT gave me quite a few notes that were out of the key,” Toton admitted, arguing that ChatGPT acted more “as a foundation, and I put my own creativity into it.”
The guitarist’s experience is a great reminder of the fact that ChatGPT isn’t capable of producing its own truly original output, but rather rehashes data that already exists in the world.
But it’s also a powerful tool that could help musicians or other artists out of a creative rut — though it’s not replacing them entirely quite yet.
“I think ChatGPT is excellent for a lot of things, but for music?” Toton argued. “Not really.”
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