I Have A Confession To Make

[jamcat]

The question here is whether a human being writes a text with all
of his or her experiences, pain, wishes and desires. Or whether a
machine puts it together completely mechanically from bits and
pieces on the internet.

In the first case, it is something living that has a connection to other
people, a communication from person to person.

In the second case, it is something mechanical, something dead,
that has cobbled something together from the wasteland of bits and
bytes - according to stereotypically learned rules.

Ah, yes. Because “ooh baby, baby baby. Baby baby baby, yeah” has so much more meaning when it’s coming from a real person.

[Tiles]

What happened here was that Bones used the AI ​​for "ideas"
- specifically for lyrics.

And what is so scary about it? Lyics generators existed long before AI.

What Bones did here, and how he used AI, is not different from a method with writing a few buzzwords at some papers, throwing it into a hat, pick out one, and go from there. And this is a very valid method to write song lyrics from before internet and pc.

[telecharge]

[BONES]

Yet in my mind, there is no doubt that Prodigy and Chemical Brothers have revolutionised electronic music (and music in general).

I'm not hearing it. Chemical Brothers have one song that sounds vaguely like a Frontlione Assembly rip-off but, beyond that, I've not hear anything from them that seems remotely different from anyone else.

The song you are saying is not very new, by the way, is from mid-90s.... Have you realised that ?

Yes. The same year that Smack My Bitch Up was released, PWEI broke up, after five albums.

Find me one equivalent example in this era. Maybe you can name Front242 from Belgium but they are far from this level of quality.

Pop Will Eat Itself constantly reinvented their sound on every album, with the aid of top-shelf producers like Flood. This is what they sounded like on their first album in 1987 -



Then on their second album in 1989, the same year NIN released Pretty Hate Machine, they had refined things, probably thanks to Flood -



Then they took a left turn in 1991 -



By 1994 they were back with their heaviest sound yet -



But this is possibly my favourite, from between their 2nd and 3rd albums -



But the point is, you are not going to fully understand how much Prodigy sounds like a pale imitation of PWEI without listening to all their stuff, because they were so inventive that it's impossible to pick a "typical" PWEI song. From this sampling, though, you can definitely feel their overall vibe.

The mix of rock and electronic, today ubiquitous, was at this time unheard of and defined modern music.

Come on, rock and electronic music had existed right through the 1980s. Have you never heard of DEVO or Simple Minds? Even before that there was Prog Rock. For that matter, I was doing rock with electronic instruments in the mid-80's (badly). This from 1987 -

[BONES]

The question here is whether a human being writes a text with all of his or her experiences, pain, wishes and desires. Or whether a machine puts it together completely mechanically from bits and pieces on the internet.

Who the f**k does that? I just come up with shit that rhymes. All of my "experiences, pain, wishes and desires" comes out in the performance, not the writing.

In the first case, it is something living that has a connection to other
people, a communication from person to person.

Puke! People can f**k right off as far as I'm concerned. We make our connection on stage, where it matters, not through the lyrics but through the performance. The anger, the hatred laid bare for all to see. I could be singing about rainbows but it would still come out like that. I could spend my time baying like a wolf and people would still get the message.

But here a completely different dimension is opened up: It is
about an AI "creating" almost all of the creative content on a
prompt. That is something completely different - the genie is
out of the bottle!

That all depends on how you want to use it. I use AI in Photoshop at work every day but, interestingly, not for any of the image editing tasks you listed. I use it to extend backgrounds and to reposition subjects within an image so that it fits my needs better. I would never leave an AI to do any color correction or other stuff I can do in my sleep.

If the essence of a work of art was created by AI, then we have
crossed the Rubicon. Then it is not a thinking and feeling human
who has created a work, but a mechanistic AI who has cobbled
something together through the skillful application of its (neural)
rules.

Isn't that what we all do? Of course it is. We write using scales and time signatures, all just formulae, working within strictures that we accept as part of the process. Similarly, if I tell the AI to write quatrains using iambic pentameter, that's what the little f**ker will do. I choose, it doesn't. If I tell it to write something about the frustrations of being an intelligent being living amongst a society of absolute f**king morons, that's what it will do. And whilst it won't have its own experience to draw upon, it has been trained on the experiences of thousands of cleverer people than me who could express those thoughts better than I ever could. Why wouldn't I want to take full advantage of that? Is your ego so fragile that you can't except any help, that every little thing has to come from your tiny, malnourished brain? Or is it that, like most people, you way over-value yourself? Honestly, people are worthless f**king trash, how is that not completely obvious?

The essence of a song is the song itself (melody, rhythm - all of
that together) and its lyrics. For many listeners, such a song has
meaning because it creates a connection to their life. It is about
human experiences, reflections, pain and love, basically
everything that guides us as humans and is important to us.

Important to you, maybe, I don't give a f**k about any of that bullshit. The sooner humanity is gone, the better.

But an AI has nothing to do with that.

I daresay it knows more about it that you do. It will have read and absorbed the knowledge and experiences from millions of books and blogs and social media. OTOH, you only know what your own life and perspective is. I'd trust AI to write better lyrics for me more than I would trust you because, very clearly, you don't see the world the way I do. But if I explain myself clearly enough to the AI, it will nail it eventually. Sometimes on the first try but it usually takes a few goes around to get what I want.

An AI is a collection of dead
wasteland that has simply collected parts of songs and lyrics -
parts that it knows often appear together on the Internet.

Not if you ask it to write prose or poetry, rather than song lyrics. I get a lot of my lyrical ideas from books I read or TV shows and movies I watch, how is that any different to what AI is doing? I almost never write about anything personal, who the f**k would want to hear that? And I can assure that my life is a lot more interesting than yours.

[BONES]

What Bones did here, and how he used AI, is not different from a method with writing a few buzzwords at some papers, throwing it into a hat, pick out one, and go from there. And this is a very valid method to write song lyrics from before internet and pc.

Yep. For one of my favourite Wire albums, A Bell is a Cup Until It Is Struck, they sat around a table and passed a notepad around, with each member writing the next line. And on one of the songs, Kidney Bingos, they just flicked through a newspaper, grabbing random headlines from random articles. Consequently, the lyrics make almost no sense at all but the songs are all f**king great!

Money spine, paper lung
Kidney Bingos, organ fun.

Classic!

[BONES]

BTW, this is the Production Techniques forum so any discussion of AI or other tools used in production are fair game as far as I'm concerned, and it's my f**king thread. Talking about Ai is far more interesting than talking about me, I can assure you.

[kritikon]

AI makes sense to me when I compare it to some of the utter drivel that comes out of those pained over-emoting numpties who simply manage to find 378 ways of rhyming words with love and pain. Most mainstream lyrics, even well-thought of lyrics are simplistic variations on "I love you", "why won't you love me back, bastard/bitch", "I hate you for not loving me and I'm going to find creative and rhyming ways of killing you, bastard/bitch". And then of course there's the "I dunno WTF I'm doing, what rhymes with what-is-it-all-about?"

More thought goes into limericks IMO and at least they can be funny. Adele gets the shits if people laugh about her emotional pain when she's crooning it loud. I absolutely get what Bones says about the delivery/performance than the lyrics. TBH for decades I mostly completely ignore the actual lyrical content of most songs I enjoy - I enjoy the voice and the way it's delivered. I can probably recite some Bowie songs but only because of repetition. Mostly his songs grab me because he's got a unique voice and vocal style, alongside interesting melodies. Lady Grinning Soul is one of my all-time favourite tracks and I'll howl along to it in the car when nobody can witness it, but really I couldn't give you any idea what it's actually about. No fkn idea at all, even after 40-odd years, though for sure Bowie sounds very earnest about whatever it is he's saying . Probably verbal diarrhoea, I suspect. I know Bono has absolute verbal diarrhoea but he can wail beautifully. His voice is far, far better than any shite he writes.

So anything AI can come up with already has quite a low bar to compete with, and is reasonably likely to be better. And possibly AI will at least tell you to f**k off if you want a rhyme about an orange rather than make up dodgy nearly-rhymes that don't.

[kritikon]

Actually....



...I'm gonna have a whinge
about my orange
It don't rhyme
What a fkn pantomime

my orange don't love me
So painful it's gonna be
Maybe I'll have an apple
rhyming that's no grapple

I'll peel me a grape
Cos I'm posh, and not no ape
Maybe stick with pomegranate
but I hate fruit, damnit!



I really should be famous by now.
So, what does AI come up with for a fruit-based rhyme?

[jamcat]

Money spine, paper lung
Kidney Bingos, organ fun.

Classic!

And people will somehow find their own meaning to project on to it. It will mean something personal and different to each listener. Or perhaps nothing at all. That's the beauty of lyrics. And also exactly why it doesn't matter if they were written by an AI or a monkey with a typewriter.

[BONES]

TBH for decades I mostly completely ignore the actual lyrical content of most songs I enjoy - I enjoy the voice and the way it's delivered. I can probably recite some Bowie songs but only because of repetition. Mostly his songs grab me because he's got a unique voice and vocal style, alongside interesting melodies.

Working on my covers side-project has been really interesting in that respect. Some of them have lyrics that, when you write them down and read them, are beautifully poetic and some really successful songs are absolute drivel. Van Halen's Jump, for example, has the most ridiculous lyrics you will ever read, while some of Andrew Eldritch's (The Sisters of Mercy) lyrics are amazing. Tears For Fears have some good lyrics, too. From Shout which, on the surface, seems like such a nice, uplifting song -

"And when you've taken down your guard
If I could change your mind
I'd really love to break your heart"

Even New Order, who sound like Bernie is just singing the first thing that comes into his stupid head, are actually kinda cool when you read them. I'm not sure they actually mean anything but they feel like they are really deep and I'm just too superficial to understand.

[jamcat]

“I like walking in the park when it gets late at night. I move ‘round in the dark, and leave when it gets light.”

Whoa, mind blown! So much deeper than David Lee Roth’s exploration of existential crisis and record machines.

[donkey tugger]

My all time Barney fave is;

"To buy a drink that is so much more reasonable
I think I'll go there when it gets seasonable"

[Bunny_boy]

My all time Barney fave is;

"To buy a drink that is so much more reasonable
I think I'll go there when it gets seasonable"

Is that the episode where he gets kicked out the B Sharps?

[seafire]

Fine Time has some deep lines...

You're much too young
To be a part of me
Too young
To get a hold on me
You're much too young
You're much too young
You're much too young
To mess around with me
Hey
You know I've met a lot of cool chicks
But I've never met a girl with all her own teeth
That's why I love you babe
That's why we could be
But you're too young
Too young
The past doesn't matter [Repeat: x 12]
Hey
Sophisticated lady
You know I've met a lot of cool chicks
But you've got style
You've got class
But most of all
You've got love technique.