November 13, 2017

It's all over, folks

BBC - Taryn Southern, a YouTube star and content creator, has just released a song she wrote with the help of artificial intelligence.

Called Break Free, it's a brooding ballad that wouldn't sound out of place on the Hunger Games soundtrack.

Southern wrote the lyrics and melody, but the backing track was built by her laptop, after she punched in a number of settings for the song's mood, tempo and instrumentation.

"My new collaborator is not human," she grins. "It's an AI algorithm".

As a YouTuber, Southern is used to adapting new technology, and her interest in AI was sparked by an article on The Verge, describing how programmers at Sony had fed the Beatles' back catalogue into a computer and urged it to write a new Lennon-McCartney track. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Could AI eventually write songs in the style of The Beatles? And would you want it to, even if it could?

The result may have been hilariously naff, but it prompted the headline: "This AI-written pop song is almost certainly a dire warning for humanity.".....

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