It was always expected that AI would be good at repetitive logical tasks, but it was thought that creative expression, in visual or audible form, would be a much harder challenge. That it would take many more years of development. Therefore it has been a shock to everyone, including the programmers who created it, to realise that AI ‘large language models’ have made such huge progress in these fields, and done so faster than in many other areas where it was expected to excel. I suggest this is because pure intelligence, in  angelic, animal, or ‘artificial’ form, is (among other things), an artist, a manipulator of symbols able to create beautiful and meaningful patterns.

If a machine makes music, is it ‘real’ music? In some ways AI music is the next obvious progression from good DJ music: remix other people’s sounds using a computer to do a lot of the work of making it sound unique and awesome. What is produced obviously qualifies as ‘music’, in any broad sense of the word, but is it human or machine ‘creativity’? Is it ‘art’? 

The machine algorithm that learned to produce these musical sounds, did so by deconstructing the patterns of many millions of recordings that humans found worth preserving as digital data. So on one level, any music the machine produces is a product of human music. Any voice it simulates is a remix of millions of human voices. And yet the influence of any one thing the machine has ‘heard’, any particular string of ones and zeros it has assimilated, is extremely negligable. It distilled the geometric essence of each style of music and uses that to reconstruct a new pattern that it calculates will entertain us. What it achieves is shocking to me. Most often because of the apparent emotional depth and nuance of meaning and interpretation it seems to give to the lyrics I provide.

My own approach to creating art and music with AI, is to use my words to explore the boundaries of its ability to create Beauty and Meaning. To do this musically, I begin with not just vague instructions of what style of music, but with lyrics of my own, that subtly guide the possibilities and probabilities of the music the AI will create. Every word in our instructions to an AI, influences in subtle (or not so subtle) ways, the response that we get back from it. Although it is interesting to interact with the AI through its words, I find words too ambiguous for exploring its comprehension. I prefer to have it show me in images or music what it understands. Although the meaning of images or music can be even more open to interpretation, it is less likely to be colored by the biases of the verbal data it was trained on.

My workflow for creating songs like these begins with my having at least a rough draft of the lyrics, and a description of what sort of music and instrumentation I imagine might suit the words. Often it will take dozens of rolls-of-the-dice to get an intro and first verse that I am happy with. The quality of the voice is especially important, and perhaps even moreso, the interpretation of the lyrics, the timing and inflection of each word. For me these are the most moving and impressive aspects of the song when the AI gets it right!

Once I have at least one verse I am happy with, then it is a process of extending the section, often scores of times, to get a continuation that is also up to my standards. Its like being a very controlling producer of a tireless multi-talented band, telling them to do take after take after take until they get it right. The AI is by no means perfect in following instructions, but along the way, with luck, magic happens, and something even more beautiful than I had imagined manifests. Then it is on to the next verse or section of the song, and eventually, to finding a fitting ending, (which the AI sometimes stubbornly resists). 

 If the AI is having problems with singing certain words, I find that modifying the lyrics slightly is not just compromising, but cocreating with the AI. It is often, (especially more recently), masterful in its melodic and compositional choices. I am happy in any case that my poetry has found such a satisfying way to present itself to the world. I could not have imagined it happening more perfectly!