Denne artikel er lidt anderledes, end det vi ellers udgiver her på siden, idet den tager udgangspunkt i et spørgsmål fra en fan til sangeren Nick Cave i 2019, på hans blog The Red Hand Files. Her blev Cave spurgt, om AI nogensinde ville kunne skrive en god sang? Samtidig er der en anden fan i 2023, som har bedt ChatGPT om at skrive en ny sang i samme stil som Nick Caves.

Når vi vælger at bearbejde spørgsmålet her på Viden.AI, er det, fordi det er relaterbart for de fleste undervisere. På et eller andet tidspunkt vil vi stå over for samme spørgsmål: Vil den kunstige intelligens kunne skrive bedre tekster end os? Jeg mener, at Nick Cave har nogle gode pointer, som jeg gerne vil udfolde i denne artikel.

Kunstig intelligens som sangsskriver

Det er interessant, at den kunstige intelligens kan være en sparringspartner, når en kunstner skal lave ny musik. Fx er der et meget fint eksempel, hvor en AI Bot har hentet inspiration hos Metallica og derefter har skrevet sangen "Deliverance Rides". For at skrive sangen er der lavet en data scraping (metode til at hente den rå data fra et website) af  Genius Lyrics. Disse data er blevet brugt til at træne en simpel kunstig intelligens, og resultatet er en sangtekst, som Metallica kunne have skrevet. Den giver dog ikke meget mening. Vurder selv:

Beaten down and destroy
Dead sure she'll never you betray
Hell is the one who waits for you
Now I roam The world all alone

Bound by the leather steeds they ride
Crown yourself the world and tired
Dying, one who waits for you
No, there's no longer cares

I'm the sun
I'm insane
Yes she'll never love
Never me
So let it be
Obey your eyes
Death! deliverance rides
Yeah-yeah, yo!

Sangen er sat sammen af en masse brudstykker fra Metallicas mange plader, og den lyder faktisk ret godt. Imidlertid fungerer teksten ikke, hverken som tekst i sig selv eller i forhold til musikken.

Ovenstående eksempel er fra 2020, og der er sket ret meget siden dengang.

Generering af musik fra tekst (T2S)

Det netop lancerede Googles MusicLM kan lave tekst om til lyd på samme måde, som DALL-E kan lave tekst om til billeder. Det interessante er, at man kan opbygge sange ud fra sætninger, og at programmet kan lave overgange mellem de input, som brugeren har givet.

Her er et eksempel fra Story mode i MusicLM, hvor sangen er opbygget ved hjælp af følgende tekst:

  • time to meditate (0:00-0:15)
  • time to wake up (0:15-0:30)
  • time to run (0:30-0:45)
  • time to give 100% (0:45-0:60)

Lyt, og tag stilling til, om du kan høre ændringerne i musikken. Vurder også, om musikken passer til sætningerne herover.

Story Mode i MusicLM
0:00
/1:00

Der findes en masse eksempler på MusicLMs hjemmeside, men på nuværende tidspunkt kan man ikke selv interagere med programmet. Vi begynder dog at se nye muligheder for at lave musik med kunstig intelligens. Men hvad betyder det for musikerne?

Kunstig intelligens vil altid være en replikation af tidligere sange

Den kunstige intelligens efterligner en stil og laver uendelige gentagelser, som har til hensigt at lave musik, som er tilpasset den enkelte person og dennes humør og ønsker. Men spørgsmålet er, om vi overhovedet har brug for det? Og bliver det ikke meget kedelig musik i længden?

It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.

Nick Cave mener, at det kræver en personlig rejse gennem livet, et klart mål og en følelse af at være til stede i verden for at skabe noget genialt. (Se Caves indlæg om kunstig intelligens nederst i denne artikel.) Det er noget, som ingen kunstig intelligens vil kunne opfylde, og det skal den heller ikke. Han understreger nogle vigtige pointer i den igangværende debat om kunstig intelligens, som vi let kan glemme, når teknologien udvikles så hurtigt. På grund af fascinationen af den kunstige intelligens er der mange, der forventer, at den snart vil kunne overtage en masse forskellige jobs. Men Nick Cave påpeger, at vi ikke må glemme, at produkterne, som bliver genereret af kunstig intelligens ikke har en bevidsthed bag sig og kun er skabt til at imitere. Kunst skabes, når man udfordrer sine egne evner og formår at overvinde og udvide egne grænser.

Det handler ikke kun om det enkelte værk, men derimod om mennesket bag, den oplevede kontekst og processen med frembringelsen af værket. I følge Nick Cave er det netop kunstnerens begrænsninger, der gør sangene gode.

Hør sidste del af Nick Caves blogindlæg som musik: So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.

Stay With Me with Voicemod Text to Song
0:00
/0:27

Vil den kunstige intelligens kunne skrive bedre tekster end mennesker?

Måske på sigt. Den kunstige intelligens skriver tekster ud fra det datasæt, den er trænet med, og nogle udgaver kan hente informationer fra nettet. Alle disse data bearbejdes ud fra en algoritme, og efterfølgende bruges datasuppen til at sammensætte nye tekster. Men hvis man kikker teksterne efter, så mangler der kreativitet, originalitet og dybde, hvilket er noget, som kun menneskelig erfaring og indsigt kan give. I fremtiden kan det godt være, at den kunstige intelligens bliver så god, at mennesket bliver overhalet, men lige nu er det en grå masse af ord som bliver spyttet ud – uden nerve!

Considering human imagination the last piece of wilderness, do you think AI will ever be able to write a good song? - The Red Hand Files
Dear Peter, In Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the work place. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say tha…

“Considering human imagination the last piece of wilderness, do you think AI will ever be able to write a good song?”

PETER, LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA
Dear Peter,

In Yuval Noah Harari’s new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the workplace. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say that AI will be able to write better songs than humans can. He says, and excuse my simplistic summation, that we listen to songs to make us feel certain things and that in the future AI will simply be able to map the individual mind and create songs tailored exclusively to our own particular mental algorithms, that can make us feel, with far more intensity and precision, whatever it is we want to feel. If we are feeling sad and want to feel happy we simply listen to our bespoke AI happy song and the job will be done.

But, I am not sure that this is all songs do. Of course, we go to songs to make us feel something — happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever — but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.

It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel — in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these same feelings, but more intensely than any human songwriter could do.

But, I don’t feel that when we listen to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen — a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation — a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.

What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.

Love, Nick

Kilder

The Amazing Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming The Music Industry
Artificial intelligence (AI) helps businesses in the music industry sort through data, gain insights from it and become more efficient. From creating music and lyrics to helping discover new musical talent, AI is disrupting the music industry.

7 Best AI Music Generators (December 2022)
Top 7 AI Music Generators · 1. Amper Music · 2. AIVA · 3. Ecrett Music · 4. Soundraw · 5. Boomy · 6. OpenAI - MuseNet · 7. Amadeus Code.
What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music?
As the emerging class of generative AI companies matures, can their technology transform the way songs are written?
This AI-Generated METALLICA Song is Kinda Good
The lyrics also... kinda make sense? They sound like Metallica lyrics.
‘This song sucks’: Nick Cave responds to ChatGPT song written in style of Nick Cave
Singer-songwriter dissects lyrics produced by popular chatbot, saying it is ‘a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human’
ChatGPT skrev Nick Cave-sang – en grotesk hån, lyder det fra musikeren
Musikeren Nick Cave er ikke imponeret over den Nick Cave-sang, som ChatGPT har skrevet og kalder teksten for en grotesk hån mod det at være menneske.
ChatGPT er en hån mod at være Nick Cave
På Nick Caves Q&A-blog The Red Hand Files kan man i denne uge læse hans reaktion på en sang, som AI’en ChatGPT har skrevet i hans navn. Han var ikke fan.
Magenta
A research project exploring the role of machine learning in the process of creating art and music.
Are AI-generated songs a ‘grotesque mockery’ of humanity or simply an opportunity to make a new kind of music? | Jeff Sparrow
Nick Cave has condemned a song designed and directed by ChatGPT. But new technology should be embraced, not feared
Google’s new AI turns text into music
You can hear examples, but can’t try it out.
Google created an AI that can generate music from text descriptions, but won’t release it
Google has created an AI system that can generate songs given detailed text descriptions. But it won’t release it for fear of the risks.