Robots Make Music.
There’s probably very little chance that we’ll ever see Kanye West and Rick Astley hop on a track together. That’s just a sad fact that we must begrudgingly come to terms with. Or maybe not. OpenAI have just released thousands of AI-generated songs on their ‘Jukebox’, a neural net that creates music in a variety of genres. I really did try my best to read the explanation, but it just confused me and made me feel sad, so I gave up. But without getting too technical, here are the cliffnotes: people in white coats play millions of songs to a machine, the machine learns roughly what makes up ‘listenable’ music, some other iRobot sh*t happens, and then somehow Tupac starts playing. I must say though, I’ve been going through this for a while now and I honestly can’t work out if it’s really impressive or really pointless. We’ve been to the Moon, we have devices in our pockets that allow us to speak to people anywhere in the world, we can buy actual drones – and for some reason I’m amazed that a hyperintelligent supercomputer is able to make a song that almost sounds like Elvis. Well you can make your own minds up, but I think “Hot Tub Christmas” in the style of Frank Sinatra is destined to be a hit.
Play The Music.