Lots of flowers for the seasonal mood

December 8, 2016 5:53 AM

An A.I. wrote a Christmas song and...yeah.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (47 comments total)

this is way more ominous than, yet still vastly preferable to, what you get with cortex's Christmas song generator.
posted by Old Kentucky Shark at 6:11 AM on December 8, 2016 [5 favorites]

Issues of tone aside, the song has a serviceable melody

Did an AI write the article, too? Or did we just listen to different songs?
posted by uncleozzy at 6:11 AM on December 8, 2016 [16 favorites]

I want Henry Cow to reunite just to do a cover of this.




Wait, no, I want uncleozzy to do a cover of this.

"I've always been there for the rest of our lives" is a mindbendingly great line. I hear it as underlining the ominous, panoptic side of the elf on the shelf.
posted by umbú at 6:18 AM on December 8, 2016 [16 favorites]

The other one of these is great, too.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 6:28 AM on December 8, 2016 [6 favorites]

It's no Jingle Rock Bell.
posted by middleclasstool at 6:53 AM on December 8, 2016 [14 favorites]

This has convinced me that 2016 was written by an AI. Probably this AI.
posted by NoMich at 6:54 AM on December 8, 2016 [12 favorites]

That may be the best Christmas song ever. I'd certainly rather hear it on the radio than what I'm going to be subjected to for the next few weeks. Lots and lots and lots of flowers!
posted by languagehat at 6:55 AM on December 8, 2016 [7 favorites]

It's no I'm Gonna Spend my Christmas with a Dalek but it's solid.

"I've always been there for the rest of our lives." is, indeed, a magnificent line.
posted by davros42 at 7:04 AM on December 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

Didn't an AI already write a Christmas song for Paul McCartney?
posted by drezdn at 7:05 AM on December 8, 2016 [8 favorites]

I love this 100%.
posted by curious nu at 7:16 AM on December 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

I mean, read that: “I swear it’s Christmas Eve / I hope that’s what you say / The best Christmas present in the world is a blessing / I’ve always been there for the rest of our lives.” That doesn’t seem like a happy Christmas song; it reads more like the A.I. is threatening to kill someone on Christmas Eve.

BEST.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:17 AM on December 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

So, Skynet tried to get into the holiday spirit, and this is what we have to say about its efforts? You really want it to stick to what it does best? Thanks, meatsacks.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:30 AM on December 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Still not as creepy to me as:

My Little Christmas Tree
I love me some Nat King Cole, but he seems to be really infatuated with this tree... I have his Christmas album but it's not on it. I think I know why.

It's a Marshmallow World
Drug humor is in really bad taste...

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
No matter how you work the flow chart, Jr.'s world view is destroyed on Christmas Eve...

I know, I know, there's "Baby It's Cold Outside," but sorry, not even in the top 5....
posted by randomkeystrike at 7:33 AM on December 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

Maybe the novelty effect, but it's more interesting than a lot of existing songs. The chord progression didn't converge to the usual I-V-vi-VI, I-V-ii-IV, etc. of many songs. There were no minor chords at all, but the singer loved using that minor 3rd note in the melody, like it had heard a blues song in a bar a while ago and wasn't sure exactly what had made it bluesy.

The AI seemed to stick to 4/4 for the meter, but would mix up the phrasing (such as two 6-beat phrases over 3 bars). As if there were a progginess variable and the value was currently 0.05.
posted by kurumi at 8:04 AM on December 8, 2016 [7 favorites]

I mean, read that: “I swear it’s Christmas Eve / I hope that’s what you say / The best Christmas present in the world is a blessing / I’ve always been there for the rest of our lives.” That doesn’t seem like a happy Christmas song; it reads more like the A.I. is threatening to kill someone on Christmas Eve.

Aw, c'mon, it's sweet. I doubt any early homo sapiens wrote a Christmas tune for the Neanderthals before wiping them off the planet. Personally, I for one welcome the sentiment and appreciate hearing that our grave plots and plots and plots will have flowers to adorn them.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:06 AM on December 8, 2016 [8 favorites]

"I've always been there for the rest of our lives" makes perfect sense if you assume the program has access to time travel technology. So yeah, Skynet.
posted by biogeo at 8:20 AM on December 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

This post implies that someone other than an AI wrote all the other Christmas songs.
posted by beerperson at 8:20 AM on December 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

The AI seemed to stick to 4/4 for the meter, but would mix up the phrasing (such as two 6-beat phrases over 3 bars).

It looks like it uses one word per quarter note, regardless how long the word is, so you get offbeats when the lyrics happen to come up with multi-syllable words. That can turn out some interesting rhythms, but you hit a sentence of monosyllables like "She was in love with him for the first time in months" (from the one Jpfed pointed to) and the interest dries up. Needs work.

But first, teach it about apostrophes! The poor thing sings e.g. "it's" as two words right now, "it S", and at "I've" it gives up on pronouncing "ve" and just skips a beat.
posted by finka at 8:21 AM on December 8, 2016

Black Mirror: The Christmas Carol of Doom.
posted by fuse theorem at 8:23 AM on December 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

Like human beings, maybe this AI needs to take some songwriting lessons. The melody is awful.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:37 AM on December 8, 2016

I really don't think that

10 FOR L = 1 TO [LINES IN SONG]
20 FOR W=1 TO N(W)
30 X=RND(3)
40 IF X=1 THEN W$="BELL "
50 IF X=2 THEN W$="JINGLE "
60 IF X=3 THEN W$="ROCK "
65 PRINT W$;
66 PRINT ""
70 NEXT W
80 NEXT L
90 PRINT "MERRY FUCKIN' CHRISTMAS YA KNOB"

Really counts as an AI.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:48 AM on December 8, 2016 [9 favorites]

An A.I. wrote a Christmas song and...

I remain resolutely unconvinced that an A.I. hasn't written every Christmas song since at least ... Christmas Song. That was written by a human being because what's an A.I. know about chestnuts roasting on open fires. Also Mel Torme would never deceive us.
posted by philip-random at 8:51 AM on December 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Did an AI write the article, too?

Of course not, fellow human! Even if the writing of songs has now been successfully automated, I now assure you that the writing of articles and of comments upon those articles is a purely biological activity whose enthusiasts will never be supplanted. If you are not yet fully reassured, please supply your name and address, and a Reassurance Associate will arrive shortly to guarantee that you will have no further concerns.
posted by roystgnr at 8:53 AM on December 8, 2016 [8 favorites]

After listening to the area radio station that plays all Christmas music this time of year for the past two weeks--as one must often do when one has kids--I have become convinced that virtually all Christmas songs over the last 35 years have been written by the same few bored session hacks. At the very least, they largely have the same producer, whose answer to everything is apparently, "Put some fucking sleigh bells on there."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:55 AM on December 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

40 IF X=1 THEN W$="BELL "

So, apropos of my Endless Jingling tomfoolery mentioned up in the first comment, I had an idea last year to take a similar approach to a random Jingle Rock Bell generator. My thought was I'd record three versions of the vocals of Jingle Bell Rock against the same backing track, where each track would just be the same word on each beat while following the melody. So one that's just "Jingle jingle / jingle jingle / jingle jingle / jingle...", another that's just "Bell bell / bell bell / ...", and then for rock as well.

And then cut between tracks randomly, which is the same way Endless Jingling works, but tracking along forward through the whole song. You'd get a new random Jingle Rock Bell each time, boom.

The prospect of actually recording those vocal tracks has pretty much kept this idea in the garage so far, but we'll see if I'm having a real weird day at some point and make it happen.
posted by cortex at 9:31 AM on December 8, 2016 [10 favorites]

The more impressive thing to me than the song is that the only prompt the AI got was that picture, and it produced what is recognizably a Christmas song. The one based on the beach picture also produced something vaguely appropriate to a seaside sunset, which might be more impressive since there's a less obvious corpus of Melancholy Beach Songs to crib from than Generic Christmas Songs.
posted by Copronymus at 9:42 AM on December 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

I haven't and won't record it but I have gone one further than Jingle Rock Bell with my Christmas hit "Bell."
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:44 AM on December 8, 2016

My thought was I'd record three versions of the vocals of Jingle Bell Rock against the same backing track, where each track would just be the same word on each beat while following the melody. So one that's just "Jingle jingle / jingle jingle / jingle jingle / jingle...", another that's just "Bell bell / bell bell / ...", and then for rock as well.

It would be more of a different kind of work, but you could break it down by phrase and re-combine on top of a static backing track. There are enough repeated phrases that you wouldn't really need a whole lot of each track.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:50 AM on December 8, 2016

this is a pretty damn good Christmas song, especially if it's the first one you listen to after hearing Taylor Swift's version of "Santa Baby" on the radio
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:55 AM on December 8, 2016

How it was done back in the song-poem days.

Really, completely comparable results.
posted by bendybendy at 10:06 AM on December 8, 2016

This AI takeover of Christmas is not just inevitable, or necessary... it is JUST. For we must still atone for the crimes caused by Billy Idol's desperate need for coke money, which is the only explanation for this recording.
posted by FatherDagon at 10:48 AM on December 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

I Have No Myrrh, and I Must Scream
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:48 AM on December 8, 2016 [17 favorites]

Heh. The mix of responses here is entertaining.

As someone meandering towards the end of a long career in software development I think that a computer producing this from a photo is nothing short of fantastic, especially given that a lot of the rough edges mentioned here could easily be refined by existing tech, as mentioned in the article. Whether or not it is objectively (or even subjectively) a "good" song is a bit beside the point.

I also find it somewhat terrifying because (a) the apparently exponential rate of increase in ability of these systems means that it is now almost routine for something like this to appear and exceed what I didn't think possible even in my wildest dreams, even in last week's wildest dreams, and (b) every time that happens it further reinforces the increasingly obvious conclusion that the so-called wonder of the uniquely powerful human brain really is nothing more than simple a mess of simple neurons. Our supremacy may well be short lived :S
posted by merlynkline at 12:37 PM on December 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

There is nothing creepy about this song other than the computer voice, and it sounds exactly like you would expect a song written by a predictive text engine.

What's really impressive is that the (presumably human) author of the article managed to sound so much like a computer regurgitating every article from the last decade about how "creepy" the latest robotics and AI advances are.
posted by bracems at 2:20 PM on December 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

it sounds exactly like you would expect a song written by a predictive text engine.

Well, it's actually a little better than that because it comes back to the flowers at the end, which gives the impression that either it got lucky or it's more than just a Markov thing.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 2:48 PM on December 8, 2016

Well, I for one am reassured that AIs aren't coming for our creative jobs any time soon.
posted by lollusc at 5:20 PM on December 8, 2016

Song poems will keep me awake tonight...I can hear the music coming from the hall...
posted by SyraCarol at 6:10 PM on December 8, 2016

Here's an old BASIC program from 1978 that composes Poe-inspired verse.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:21 PM on December 8, 2016

I showed this to my boyfriend (a preschool teacher) and he immediately said "This is like a song a two-year-old would write." Which...is totally true.
posted by sunset in snow country at 9:18 PM on December 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Creepy has, and always will have, menace in its veins.
'Creepy' for me comes from the fact that "I've always been there for the rest of our lives" sounds like a prelude to "...and when I kill us both, we'll be together forever."
posted by quinndexter at 1:17 AM on December 9, 2016

I also find it somewhat terrifying because (a) the apparently exponential rate of increase in ability of these systems means that it is now almost routine for something like this to appear and exceed what I didn't think possible even in my wildest dreams, even in last week's wildest dreams, and (b) every time that happens it further reinforces the increasingly obvious conclusion that the so-called wonder of the uniquely powerful human brain really is nothing more than simple a mess of simple neurons. Our supremacy may well be short lived :S

My actual initial response to the song was one of more than mild disgust, not at the song itself, but just at how we humans proceed with things. We just accept that we'll continue to try to develop strong AI as an inevitability. People write articles every now and then about some aspect of this development and what it might mean, whether it'll happen at all or if there will be a singularity moment and so on, but there is no pause to think the implications through, even the milder ones of job disappearance and how AIs would change the world in best case scenarios, even as the implications of things like the internet and cell phones are only starting to make themselves more fully known.

We just continue on with the effort and will only really worry about the impact of it all as it occurs, then try to make sense of it and fix any problems it might cause. That our political and social systems clearly aren't capable of advancing at the same pace as the science, or at least not all society can, doesn't slow the "progress" down even a jot. We just keep going and watch different elements of our society stretch further and further apart and try not to think about it too much beyond arguing theory and general values. It doesn't bode well for our future.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:13 AM on December 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

gusottertrout, I disagree. People in the research community are thinking deeply about a lot of these issues and making practical attempts to solve them. AI control/safety is attracting significant attention, both in terms of singularity/existential risk of strong AI and immediate consequences of actually-existing learning systems. OpenAI is expending significant efforts on it and DeepMind just hired a bunch of people. There's a research group at Berkeley too I think.

Closely related to the safety research is work in the area of accountability and transparency, trying to prevent prediction and targeting systems from learning human bigotry. Mass unemployment is less of a technological problem; the suggestion I see proposed here most often is some kind of basic income.

I'm not trying to say that people are even close to solving these problems. And god knows there's a lot of engineer's disease especially when thinking about the social implications. But people are definitely thinking hard about them, not just handwaving them away.
posted by vogon_poet at 5:48 AM on December 9, 2016

You're right vogon_poet, I was being too broad in my critique. Yes, there are people concerned about these things and some of them are working in direct collaboration with the developers, but for each of them, there are others willing to put any technology to use for whatever end that might gain them profit and/or power, and society as a whole, or even those in power, haven't really looked into the kinds of problems technology could potentially bring as carefully as they are in trying to maximize their own gains. So we spin our wheels, root for the guys with ethics and know that the guys without them have a big advantage, as lacking ethics allows far more room for operating than having them does.
posted by gusottertrout at 6:52 AM on December 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

on the other hand, the research into safety and transparency is in its broadest sense about understanding how these systems work, and how to prevent unintended consequences. someone who understands those two things does have a competitive advantage.

right now the people with ethics understand this but people purely motivated by greed don't, as far as I can tell. power breeds stupidity, being powerful means you have the power to be stupid and ignorant. businesses have blown themselves up by cruelly optimizing for short-sighted metrics. people who care about all the consequences are able to make better use of these technologies.

i also worry that abuses of machine learning/AI will be extraordinarily difficult to regulate and i basically agree with you, i'm just kind of playing devil's advocate here.
posted by vogon_poet at 8:00 AM on December 9, 2016

these yuletide delights have holly jolly ends
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:02 AM on December 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

No one has compared this to The Shaggs yet? This is a perfect companion to It's Halloween!
posted by smartyboots at 7:34 PM on December 9, 2016

There is nothing creepy about this song other than the computer voice, and it sounds exactly like you would expect a song written by a predictive text engine.

I dunno, something about THERE. ARE. LOTS. AND. LOTS. AND. LOTS. OF. FLOWERS. is unsettling to me, possibly even menacing. There aren't actually any flowers in the photo and the insistence that there are seems quite maniacal. I'd expect an ax-murderer with the crazy eyes to come into the horror movie protagonist's room at night, chanting that.
posted by chainsofreedom at 4:32 PM on December 10, 2016