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Colin Meloy: I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song
Colin Meloy: I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song
For the record, this is a remarkably mediocre song. I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible song, though it really flirts with terribleness. No, it’s got some basics down: it (mostly) rhymes in all the right places (though that last couplet is a real doozy), it uses a chord progression (I-V-vi-IV) that is enshrined in more hits from the western pop canon than I care to count. But I think you’d agree that there’s something lacking, beyond the little obvious glitches — the missed or repeated rhymes, the grammatical mistakes, the overall banality of the content. Getting the song down, I had to fight every impulse to better the song, to make it resolve where it doesn’t otherwise, to massage out the weirdnesses. I wanted to stay as true to its creator’s vision as possible, and at the end, there’s just something missing. I want to say that ChatGPT lacks intuition. That’s one thing an AI can’t have, intuition. It has data, it has information, but it has no intuition. One thing I learned from this exercise: so much of songwriting, of writing writing, of creating, comes down to the creator’s intuition, the subtle changes that aren’t written as a rule anywhere — you just know it to be right, to be true. That’s one thing an AI can’t glean from the internet.
·colinmeloy.substack.com·
Colin Meloy: I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song