While a large percentage of people can recognize when they are talking to a chatbot rather than a human operator, the same seems not to be true when it comes to song lyrics, as it is not easy to understand when the lyrics are human creation or the creation of artificial intelligence (AI). While AI technology seems to have become the new love of the tech, the question arises as to whether it could surpass human ability in creative fields, such as music.
TickPick, a New York-based online event ticket marketplace that lets users bid on tickets , recently collected over 1,000 rock, hip-hop/rap, country, and pop songs to train its “AI artists.” TickPick conducted a survey, which involved over 1,000 people using Amazon Mechanical Turk to rate the creativity and sentimentality of lyrics. It also wanted to find out how easy or difficult it was to tell the difference between lyrics by famous songwriters and lyrics generated by AI technology. It collected thousands of song lyrics from genius.com to form a lyric corpus, sorted them by genre, and fed them to each “AI artist.” After five hours of training the machine, the AI technology was able to create songs that were virtually indistinguishable from human ingenuity, at least based on the results gathered from respondents. Nearly two in five (39.6%) rated the lyrics created by the AI technology as more emotional than lyrics created by humans. For example, many respondents considered the lyrics created by AI to be more emotional than those written by legends like Johnny Cash.
Different genres of songs were evaluated differently. Rap lyrics were the most difficult for to reproduce , because many rap songs have strange or unusual syntax. So, it took the machine learning a long time to be able to interpret this style of song. It created confusing lyrics like “Hey, my accents a mask, your man won't show it, my office is your mansion, excellence I'm really not”. The AI also produced some experimental samples. When it came to country music, the lyrics seemed to be easier for the AI to reproduce. Artificial intelligence produced depressing and sad lyrics, such as “I'd trade all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday,” and “Well, if you're looking for a one-night stand, you've come to the right place, I'm human after all, a human for hours.”
About one in four (22.2%) thought the AI lyrics were by Garth Brooks. Only 12.3% of respondents were able to find the AI-generated country music lyrics. Pop music, on the other hand, was difficult for AI to reproduce, although more than one in four thought the AI-generated lyrics were written by Billie Eilish. Only 13.6% thought the AI lyrics were written by Lady Gaga. However, when it comes to people’s favorite lyrics, human-generated lyrics still top the list. Finally, AI is changing the way businesses , and this research shows that it certainly has the potential to impact the music industry. However, AI should probably “stay away” from rap and pop music for now.
