They’re still working on it

by Joe Dysart * June 27, 2022

While the song lyrics auto-generated by AI writers have yet to win a Grammy, there are still plenty of would-be songwriters giving it a go.

The latest to join the fray was Fraser Lewry and some others at Louder Sound Magazine.

They prompted Jasper — a popular AI auto-writer — to pen lyrics in the style of rock bands Judas Priest, AC/DC, Metallica, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Led Zeppelin and others.

The resulting lyrics — which you can find on Louder Sound — are okay.

But many of the auto-generated lyrics don’t rhyme well — or don’t rhyme at all.

Part of the challenge in using AI writers to auto-generate lyrics is that you don’t always get good lyrics the first time you run a prompt — or a phrase of words pointing and what you’re looking for — the first time around.

Observes Julian Lonzano, a rapper, producer and audio engineer who has experimented with GPT-3 — the supercomputer-driven writing engine that serves as the core component of many AI writers:

“To get very specific types of output from it, you need to write very specific prompts.

“These prompts at best can lead to amazing short-form organic sounding results.

“At worst, they can sound repetitive — like a child regurgitating something they heard on TV.”

The reason why good lyrics need so much cajoling: GPT-3 runs on AI-driven predictive analytics, which attempts to generate what you’re looking for by making a very sophisticated ‘guess’ from the inputs you offer.

It’s often very good at making these guesses.

But it often veers-off in an unexpected direction, forcing users to input a prompt that’s worded slightly differently in the hopes that it will spit-out more desirable results.

Hardy souls — like ad agency Space150 — have been undeterred by these challenges.

Back in 2020, Space150 churned-out a knock-off of a Travis Scott tune that turned heads at Ad Week.

Observes Ned Lampert, executive creative director at Space150, of his experience working with an AI writer to punch-out lyrics:

“It came up with things that we would never come up with,” Lampert says. “I love the beautiful mistakes that we make all the time that get turned into work — or situations — where someone says something ridiculous and then we end up doing it.

“And there were some of those types of behaviors within this process.”

Meanwhile, a team of researchers at Georgia Tech took lyrics auto-generated by an AI writer, set them to music they created — and had a robot croon what they came up with.

The research proved so fascinating, they decided to write an entire album of songs for their silicon wonder — Shimon — and hope to take him on tour sometime.

You can check out Shimon’s sometimes eerie stylings on YouTube .

Yet another team of researchers — this time from Waterloo University — decided to push the technology a step further by coming up with an AI system that auto-generates lyrics as you play music.

Dubbed LyricJam, the AI software churns-out song lyrics based on the genre of music you’re playing.

LyricJam works by ingesting music as it’s played — and spitting-out suggested lyrics, based on what it has sensed.

For example, researchers observed that lyrics that LyricJam generates for ambient music are very different than those for upbeat music.

Observes Olga Vechtomova, an engineering professor at Waterloo University: “One unexpected finding was that participants felt encouraged by the generated lines to improvise.

“For example, the lines inspired artists to structure chords a bit differently and take their improvisation in a new direction than originally intended.

“Some musicians also used the lines to check if their improvisation had the desired emotional effect.”

Other would-be lyricists playing with AI writers include:

~ Music Web site Lyrics.rip, which used AI to generate its own knock-off of a Metallica song

~YouTuber ‘Funk Turkey,’ who used AI to forge rock poetry in the styles of AC/DC, Metallica and Bob Dylan

~Over The Bridge, a team that mostly used AI to create songs and music in the styles of Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse

Bottom line: While most recording artists probably have little fear when it comes to AI writers besting them at this point, the one thing you can say about tech in general also seems to apply to AI-generated writing: It always seems to be getting faster, cheaper and better than its previous incarnation — and often at a revolutionary pace.

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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.