Songwriting with AI: ChatGPT, Morris dancers, and The Apocalypse

(The apocalyptic bit comes at the end – logical, really)

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been trying some things with the Artificial Intelligence Entity ChatGTP, and some of the results were surprising and maybe disturbing. The way the system works is that you type in a prompt – ‘write a summary of recent research on X’; ‘compose a letter to your mother about Y’ – or whatever, and within a minute or so, the system types back a coherent response. How well does it cope with folk music-type issues? Better and worse than I expected.

Since I’d just been writing about the song (or body of related songs) The Cruel Mother, I started there. My account will be a bit anthropomorphic (I’ll say something about that later).

Prompt: Write a defence of the mother in the folk song ‘The Cruel Mother’

ChatGPT obviously recognized the song referred to and responded with 200 words, clearly setting out acceptable points – the murdered children might have been the product of abuse, the mother might have felt that they would die anyway without community support, she did feel remorse… A good, solid job, though quite unimaginative. I can see why students would use it to fulfil essay requirements.

Now, every response is generated in real time, so if you repeat a prompt, you won’t get the same response as before. I repeated the prompt – and his time I got a broadly similar response EXCEPT that the events described had an important difference. In this version, instead of focusing on the mother who had just given birth, the focus was on her mother, the babes’ grandmother, and the original, young, mother is driven to despair and infanticide by her mother’s refusal to support her.

“Her [that is, the Grandmother’s] actions are a desperate attempt to protect her daughter from the same fate and preserve her own reputation. In a way, she is sacrificing her own humanity for the sake of her daughter’s survival and future prospects.”

BUT I have not been able to find any version of the Cruel Mother with this story – and I’ve asked people who know this stuff more than me, and I’ve looked in Big Books as well. ChatGPT is known for making stuff up – it’s become known as ‘hallucinating’. For instance, it fabricated an allegation of sexual assault against a law professor in the US, supported by citing a Washington Post article that never existed, in response to a request about sexual harassment on campus. https://decrypt.co/125712/chatgpt-wrongly-accuses-law-professor-sexual-assault. Completely false.

So it seems that ChatGPT hallucinated a significant variant to the ballad story – and it’s an interesting variant, and ChatGPT’s extenuation of the mother’s action, though I don’t think it quite makes sense, adds an interesting twist. I can see how that could be made into a worthwhile new song. This is effectively creativity, though it might be accidental. Mmm.

Then I thought I’d try it as a songwriter.

Prompt: Write a song about a mother who murders her newborn children

It wouldn’t do that: it couldn’t be doing with that sort of violence. Fair enough.

So

Prompt: Write a song condemning a mother who murders her newborn children

It was happy with that, and produced something which more-or-less scanned and rhymed and made sense – but was not a great piece of work. first verse and chorus:

She brought them into this world
Nurtured and loved them with care
But something within her broke
And the darkness took over there

Chorus:
How could you do it, mother?
Take the life of your own child?
You had a duty to protect them
But instead, your heart went wild

About what I’d expected. The same prompt produced a different song – but no better.

I asked for a song about Birds in the Spring. Same again:

Oh, the birds in the spring
Their melodies make my heart sing
Their colorful feathers so bright
They bring such joy and delight

Several species were named, with appropriate sounds and movements – hopping, flitting, singing loud or twittering.
The Copper Family have nothing to fear from this competition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpMNxVRSu3I

Then I asked for a folk song about the birds in the spring – not much difference, really. ChatGPT doesn’t distinguish between songs and folk songs.

BUT then I saw a post from Graeme Rothery saying that his brother-in-law* had asked for a song about Morris dancers saving the world from The Apocalypse and had got a surprising response – a very singable set of words.

Here’s the ChatGPT’s original text:

The world is ending, chaos reigns
The sky is dark, the earth is stained
But in a village on the moor
A band of men prepare for war

They don their hats and bells and sashes
They grab their sticks and swords and lashes
They form a circle, face to face
They dance with vigor, style and grace

They leap and spin, they clash and clatter
They chant and sing, they shout and chatter
They weave their swords in patterns bright
They cast a spell of joy and light

The villagers watch with awe and wonder
They feel their spirits lift from under
The gloom and doom that filled their hearts
They join the dance, they play their parts

The morris men have saved the day
They drove the apocolypse away
With music, laughter, dance and fun
They celebrate the victory won

I thought ‘I could do something with that’. So I thought up a tune and tweaked the words a bit. For all its worldwide reach, ChatGPT doesn’t really know about Morris, so I had to change ‘They grab their sticks and swords and lashes’ (unless this is about the S&M Dark Morris sides on the Dark Web – if anyone knows of those, let me know, I’d like to photograph them) and ‘They form a circle, face to face’

My version is here:

The world is ending, chaos reigns
The sky is dark, the earth is stained
But in a village on the moor
A band of dancers they prepare for war

They put on their hats and bells and ribbons
They grab their swords from where they’re hidden
They form up in sixes, face to face
They dance with vigour, style and grace
A band of dancers go to war

They leap and spin, they clash and clatter
They chant and sing, they shout and chatter
They weave their swords in patterns bright
They cast a spell of joy and light
They dance with vigour, style and grace

The people watch with awe and wonder
They feel their spirits lift from under
They lose the gloom that filled their hearts
They join the dance, they play their parts
They cast a spell of joy and light

The Morris dancers saved the day
They drove the apocolypse away
With music, laughter, dance and fun
They celebrate the victory won
We join the dance, we play our part

Sung video version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9huy_qHDBGg

I’ve sung it twice in public so far, and it’s gone down well. Goodness.
OK, it doesn’t quite make sense, but it’s a better song than I could write. Not quite move over, Richard Thompson, but thought-provoking. Maybe our own creativity is mostly hallucination, and it’s not far behind us.

But then, if you believe that traditional songs are as good as they are because of communal authorship and evolution through transmission – which I do largely, though I know that’s only part of it – isn’t that what you’d expect? ChatGPT is the ultimate Voice of the People, or at least those people that type or scan stuff in online. Maybe if I repeatedly fed those clunky songs back in and asked ChatGPT to tweak them, we’d end up with something as good as All Things Are Quite Silent.

Anthropomorphism: it’s clear that ChatGPT’s pronouns have to be We/They, and although we call it ChatGPT, I just know that to itself it says ‘My name is Legion’. A friend tested it out by giving it a couple of very obscure but contentious questions on a subject in which he is an expert, and then argued with the responses. He told me that on the first question the system was a Good Student who modified and developed its answer in response to the criticisms, but on the second it was a Bad Student who got grumpy and recalcitrant and retreated to illogical justifications. As a result, he ended up unimpressed with its intellectual ability.

Additional note: June 2023: I said above: “So I thought up a tune” – but really what I did was to dredge up bits of all the hundreds or more traditional-ish tunes I’ve heard over the last 60 years and use the implicit musical rules (both formal and, again, traditional-ish) that my neural network now conforms to in some black-box-like way, and generate a tune that fits those parameters. What we call creativity – or pretty much the same as the AI entity was doing with its own corpus and rule structure. Mmm….

*Yes, I know that that’s a classic urban legend introduction – ‘I knew a man who knew a man whose brother knew a man who knew…’ but I think this one is genuine.