Robots are immune emotion, they said; robots can’t sing, they said; ergo, robots definitely don’t feel the Christmas spirit. Until that one day where they eventually do, and compose vaguely threatening Christmas carols about “flowers in trees” and being “always there for the rest of our lives,” as lyrics included in a song written by a University of Toronto AI.
“Lots to decorate the room. The Christmas tree is filled with flowers. I swear its 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. A hundred and a half hour ago. I’m glad to meet you. I can hear music coming from the hall. A fairy tale. A Christmas Tree. There are lots and lots and lots of flowers.”
Neural Story Singing Christmas from Hang Chu on Vimeo.
By reassuring us that it’s “glad to meet” us, the AI appears to be lulling us into a false state of complacency until the inevitable singularity, at which point it’ll definitely be happy to meet us.
The Toronto AI is amusing to say that least, but an earlier effort developed by Sony’s Computer Science Lab in Paris produced something quite remarkable: software of writing jazz music in the style of John Coltrane and other famous musicians. Using machine-learning algorithms, the Parisian AI analyzed large amounts of jazz music, then synthesized original output by mixing together elements within a set of constraints that defined the artists. You can listen to it here .
Of course, credit for the first computer-generated music goes even further back to legendary computer scientist and cryptographer Alan Turing, who composed “God Save the King” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep” using a room-sized machine in 1951 .
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