After knowing that AI can be trained to understand almost anything as long as the data and the hardware is sufficient, new projects are popping up fairly quickly.
And this time, Mathi Gatthi, a data scientist from Argentina, created an AI that can generate songs from scratch. Using OpenAI's GPT-2 language model, the AI that is called 'Keywords To Lyrics', was born out of Gatthi's struggles during his own songwriting.
Songwriters block can be a problem for all songwriters. Even the most experienced and the most successful musicians can experience this from time to time.
Taking break can often overcome the issue. 'Keywords To Lyrics' however, doesn't need breaks.
Gatthi developed the AI by training GPT-2 on data sets that comprised of songs that Google lists when he searched for the “top artists 20th century” and “top artists 21st century”
Gatthi then extracted the keywords from the songs using a tool called YAKE!, an automatic keyword extractor tool.
After gathering enough keywords, Gatthi said that he "made a website for helping in the songwriting process. You feed it with a phrase or a few words and it writes a song inspired on these."
The website also allows visitors to adjust the "creativity" of the AI, and a button to reduce the repetitiveness of the results.
'Keywords To Lyrics' was trained mostly on Pop songs, meaning that it may generate "cheesy" lyrics. But in the future, Gatthi plans to add more genre to the data sets so the AI can have a broader understanding of songs, and to allow visitors of the site to choose the genre style they want the AI to generate.
In the meantime, the AI can already generate some creative lyrics:
'Keywords To Lyrics' shows how capable AI can be when trained using the right data sets.
But at the same time, this again can sparked fear that AI could one day replace human.
In this case, this kind of AI with further training and tweaks, may replace human songwriters.
From an AI capable of writing a country song, an AI capable of combining Hip Hop and Indonesia's 'Gamelan' to create the "perfect" TikTok song, to an AI that growls Death Metal songs and others. There is no shortage of capable AIs out there.
But Gatthi is more excited about this project than concerned about the AI's potential:
"I think it’s similar to photography in the XX century, it didn’t kill painting or the creative process at all, it impulsed new art styles like photography and impressionism. In a similar way, I think tools like keyword2lyrics won’t kill songwriting, it’s just going to change the process," he said.
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