It is 2020 now and we are living in a world in which AI has taken up many roles like taking care of our homes, aiding the military and driving cars and even ships. But an AI as a songwriter? Well, that seems far fetched. However, it is true. A website named TickPick recently set out to find whether listeners can differentiate between songs written by an AI model from that of a human.
The company acquired 1000 song lyrics from the music lyrics platform, genius.com. They then categorised the songs into different genres like rap, pop, country and rock and fed them into, what they are calling “AI Artists” by using a text-generating AI model with GPU — the GPT-2.
Now, what the model did was take all the song lyrics into its database and created some new sets of lyrics by using the songs. It produced 100 songs for every genre. According to the team, each “AI Artist” was trained for 5-12 hours.
The team then ran the AI-composed songs through Grammarly’s plagiarism checker to verify if the model was copying from the artists or not. After the verification, they included the songs in four different albums with six tracks in each of them.
Now, comes the fun part. To check whether music fans can spot a song composed by a machine or not, the team invited 1,003 participants to rank creativity, emotionality and favourability of the songs
So, in each of the category, the team showed three songs written by artists like Adele and Johnny Cash and one song written by an “AI Artist”. After the survey, 40% of the listeners stated that they were more emotionally affected by the AI’s lyrics than words written by professional artists. That is insane, considering the “AI Artists” are newbies in music composition compared to the pros.
This fun experiment also revealed which specific genres are hardest for the “AI Artists” to master. As it turned out, people could not spot the rock, pop and country songs written by the AI, however, almost 36% of the participants recognised the rap songs composed by “Young AI” and could tell that a human did not write those lyrics.
You can check out the albums and the songs on TickPick’s official website.
Now, what can I say to conclude this? We are living in a crazy world where there are “AI Artists” writing songs and drones walking dogs. Now, what’s next? Robots giving birth to babies?
Featured Image Courtesy: TickPick
