I’ve got to say, I was a bit surprised by this. I would have thought that there would be a much higher anti-AI sentiment when this was posted. The content went out on reddit to 200K people and was on the front page of the ChatGPT subreddit for a day with over 667 upvotes, 147 comments and nearly 500 shares. The following is the description from the post:
‘I’ll be the first to say I don’t fully understand what’s going on with the backend of LLMs but I’ve just got the sense that it can tap into things outside of our comprehension. Without getting all woo, I wanted to see if it could give us any insights into the nature of reality, and maybe a creative medium like songwriting could open that up.
If nothing else, it felt like a fun thing to do and it was.
It wrote 7 songs which I then took to Udio. I did some editing in FL Studio to tidy it all up and remaster it. Then I’ve used Stable Diffusion and RunwayML to create a couple of shots and mixed that in with a bunch of stock. Edited it together in Prem/ After Effects to make this 33-minute video.
Tools:
Lyrics: ChatGPT
Music Gen: Udio
Music Mastering: FL Studio
AI Images: Stable Diffusion
AI Animation: RunwayML
Stock: Stuff from Envato
Editing: Prem + After Effects
I’ve been working on this in the mornings/ evenings around work over the course of about 10 days. Why did I make it? It was a bit of a compulsion and it seemed like it could be fun, which I guess is the whole point. As scary as this technology can be, it’s a lot of fun and if you’ve not really got a whole lot of time for long-form projects because you work a 9-6 and have general life responsibilities, this certainly is a way of getting something interesting done quicker.’
Here’s a list of the positive things said:
‘It’s really great and intriguing! I hope this gets the traction and visibility it deserves!’ – HimalayanHaven
‘This is cool’ – SilentRip5116
‘Thing I hardly ever do: Turnoff portrait mode…did here after a few seconds. Need to read the words. Need to listen fully, and the video was intriguing. Keeping watching once I realize the video is hella long. That was amazing, thank you!’ – Weak_Hospital_7854
‘That was really beautiful, thanks for going through the effort’ – Then-Fish-9647
‘Humanity is cooked. This is just too good.’ – 1smoothcriminal
‘I cried listening to the first one.’ – Aggressive-Dust6280
‘I don’t know. I have to double comment. I just finished this and it feels groundbreaking. This is the first time AI art has moved me in such a way and it validates much of where I believe this is heading. Thank you, so much, for this wonderful piece of art.’ – Dadbeerd
People couldn’t agree what it sounded like:
I couldn’t help but think about Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist, in particular the family tree of ideas. Where good art is a remix of several other ideas, I found that this album was compared to several different artists, proving that this project had it’s own unique identity that could sit alongside similar artists in the indie-electronica genre.
‘This reminds me of M83 and Empire of the sun.’ – BoSt0nov
‘Real big MGMT vibes.’ – sprecher1988
‘The voice is so similar to the singer of death cab for cutie, Love it!’ – fennforrestssearch
‘Daft punkgpt hits hard’ – Mtolivepickle
‘This has that Foster the People vibe and I’m digging it.’ – InterestingFrame1982
‘Just me or does this sound like J. Timberlake vibes? (unreleased Future.Sex.Love.Sound) ‘ – Food_Kindly
‘Seems to me to be very Taylor Swift influenced.’ – Cloverboy56
‘Pretty sure that’s a King Gizzard song.’ – issafly
‘Sounds like a Portugal The Man song’ – El_human
The main criticisms were that the lyrics were a little too teenage angst, but what was funny to see was people arguing over the quality of the lyrics in the thread. This felt exactly the same as debates had around non-AI music. Prior to this album project I had used Udio to generate some IDM, downtempo/ experimental tracks:
There is something a little sad seeing this blow up and have more attention than most of my human made music. I’ve been dabbling in music production for nearly 17 years now and only had one track go viral, although in an obscure way where the credit didn’t really come back to me. I’ve spoken about that here, I remember being frustrated about missing out on the accolades and opportunities around the success of the song. Eventually that sadness and frustration subsided and I was just glad to be the catalyst to create fun memories and good times to the people who had listened.
How do I feel about the small success of my AI music experiment? It’s a mixed bag and it’ll take some time to process. I’ll let you know in a later blog post
