Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/19/nirvana-i-this-bot-wrote-a-n.html
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Seemed more like an AI took many/all Nirvana songs and ran them through a sausage grinder then extruded this out.
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yeah right away it says “heart-shaped box” and what, it couldn’t have split that one up a bit more to not be a dead giveaway?
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First off, it wrote ‘LYRICS,’ not a song. If the ‘AI’ wrote music as well that would be more impressive, but this is basic (and weak) machine learning, even repeating a direct phrase as KingG noted above.
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You mean if it wrote the notes to the song? That’s not much harder than making the lyrics would have been.
Lazy music theory students have been programming computers to crank out counterpoint and figured bass exercises since the 70s.
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Oh… bullshit. A human wrote the riffs, added the effects, framed the whole damn thing. This “song” could’ve just as easily resembled Prince or Sinatra or whomever you’re aiming at from the get-go.
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Just keep it away from the Courtney Love bot.
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Smells like Machine Learning.
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Heart Shaped USB
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(Again, as in a couple or three other posts I’ve made recently in response to BB articles, and which I suspect will now become a much more common refrain on my part in future…)
But… WHY?!?!?!
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That’s literally what it does!
Worst lyrics in a song ever.
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I like it! It’s similar to other Nirvana songs where there are small callbacks to lyrics in other songs. Lots of bands do the same thing, like Counting Crows and Tom Petty. It’s also just as confusing as their other songs, particularly heart-shaped box which it quotes directly. The video is pretty great, it really reminds me of the video they released posthumously.
One Big problem I have with it, is it uses lyrics from covers they did. Seriously? It couldn’t have just been done with original Nirvana songs, you had to use the lyrics from other people’s songs that Nirvana sang once?
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Yeah, I checked out at “eat your heart-shaped box for food”
I guess the kids got processed and resold in a candy box.
Oh well, Lithium changes moods.
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She really is the best!
is it even that? A markov chain is hardly complex enough to call AI
you could have a lookup teble for the odds a word or phrase follows another word or phrase and voila.
Also, I bet they tampered with it to make it rhyme. Just a hunch.
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Totally agreed. That why I put ‘AI’ in quotes. Basic Bayesian analysis would also suffice to vaguely approximate any writer’s style/output.
The kid (?) who did this made some attention-grabbing wordplay to end nirvana with ai. Clearly it worked. My issue is more with the journos who just regurgitated that back out uncritically (or for clickbait), especially since saying ‘AI’ now (In the vernacular at least) brings the bar up to deep fakes and neural networks crushing at Go, up-ressing old footage and recreating full 3D objects and environments from photos. So putting ‘AI wrote a song’ in a headline suggests to me I’m gonna hear a fully fleshed out auto-generated song: lyrics, melody, instrumentation, arrangement, and performance. Not a 90% human-made song with super-weak bot-driven lyrics.
But I’ve prolly given more thought to this response than most of the post writers did to regurgitating the original story 
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There are 10 kinds of people: those who have at least a rough idea of how a computer program works, and those who don’t.
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