The other day in the Netherlands hosted "Eurovision" for neural networks. The first place was given to a song based on the sounds of koalas. But, as is often the case, it was not the winner who riveted everyone's attention, but the performer who took third place. The Can AI Kick It team presented the song Abbus, which is literally permeated with anarchist, revolutionary ideas. Why did it happen, what does Reddit have to do with it and who called the lawyers, says Cloud4Y.
You probably remember how the AI, created by Yandex employees, wrote the lyrics "under Yegor Letov." The album was titledβ and sounds quite in the spirit of βCivil Defenseβ. To generate lyrics, a neural network was used, which was taught to write poetry on an array of Russian poetry. After that, the neural networks showed the texts of Yegor Letov, set the poetic rhythms found in the songs of the musician, and the algorithm generated works similar in style.
Machine Made Music
Similar experiments were carried out in other countries. For example, a group of enthusiasts from Israel decided to test whether a computer can write a song that can win Eurovision? The project team loaded hundreds of Eurovision songs - melodies and lyrics - into a neural network. Algorithms produced many new melodies and rhyming lines. The most interesting of them were "mixed" into a song called Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears ("Blue Jeans and Bloody Tears").
The voices in the track belong to the computer and the first Eurovision winner from Israel - Izhar Cohen. This song, according to the participants of the project, fully reflects the spirit of Eurovision, as it contains elements of kitsch, humor and drama.
A similar project was launched in the Netherlands. The fact is that the Dutch, experimenting with songwriting with the help of artificial intelligence, inadvertently created a new musical genre: Eurovision Technofear. And it was decided to hold a full-fledged show jumping of songs written with the help of AI.
This is how the Artificial Intelligence Song Contest, an unofficial analogue of Eurovision, appeared. 13 teams from Australia, Sweden, Belgium, Great Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands participated in the competition. They had to train neural networks on existing music and lyrics so that they could fully generate new works. The creativity of the teams was evaluated by students and experts in machine learning.
First place went to a song trained on the sounds of Australian animals such as koalas, kookaburras and Tasmanian devils. The song is about fires in Australia. But much more resonance was caused by the track presented by the Can AI Kick It team: "Abbus".
revolutionary creativity
The team members wanted to create a song with a deep meaning, reflecting national motives, but at the same time well perceived by listeners from different countries. To do this, they uploaded to the cloud:
- 250 most famous works of Eurovision. Among them are "Waterloo" by Abba (winner of Sweden in 1974) and "Euphoria" by Lorin (2012, also Sweden);
- 5000 pop songs from different times;
- Folklore, including the national anthem of the Kingdom of the Netherlands from 1833 (taken from the Meertens Liederenbank database);
- A database with texts from the Reddit platform (to "enrich" the language).
Using the downloaded data, the artificial intelligence system created hundreds of new melodies. They were loaded into another AI: Ashley Burgoyne's "Eurovision Hit Predictor" to assess how memorizable and successful the resulting pieces were. The most promising was the track calling for revolution. Here is an excerpt from a very dynamic work:
ΠΠΎΡΠΌΠΎΡΡΠΈ Π½Π° ΠΌΠ΅Π½Ρ, ΡΠ΅Π²ΠΎΠ»ΡΡΠΈΡ,
ΠΡΠΎ Π±ΡΠ΄Π΅Ρ Ρ
ΠΎΡΠΎΡΠΎ.
ΠΡΠΎ Π±ΡΠ΄Π΅Ρ Ρ
ΠΎΡΠΎΡΠΎ, Ρ
ΠΎΡΠΎΡΠΎ, Ρ
ΠΎΡΠΎΡΠΎ,
ΠΡ Ρ
ΠΎΡΠΈΠΌ ΡΠ΅Π²ΠΎΠ»ΡΡΠΈΠΈ!
To say that the team was surprised by the result is to be cunning. They were dumbfounded, and began to look for the reason for the revolutionary mood of artificial intelligence. The answer came quickly.
As in the case of the famous Tay chatbot from Microsoft, which began to generate racist and sexist thoughts after learning on Twitter, and in general quickly went haywire, after which it was turned off (launched on March 23, 2016, it actually began to hate humanity in a day) , the problem was human data sources, not AI algorithms. Redditors are a very peculiar audience, freely discussing a variety of issues. And these discussions are not always peaceful and objective (well, we are all not without sin, what is there). So yes, Reddit-based learning has greatly enriched the language of the machine. But at the same time it has given some features to the discussions on this online platform. As a result - a song with an anarchist bias, somewhat similar in meaning to "I want changes" by the Kino group.
Despite everything, the team still decided to use this particular song to participate in the competition. If only to show the dangers of using AI even in a relatively harmless pop environment. By the way, all the songs written by AI and submitted to the contest can be listened to.
Lawyers are on point too.
While Europe is enjoying the creation of music, the US is already thinking about who should own the copyright to the work. After one programmer posted several works online that used the voice of hip-hop artist Jay Z, his representatives sent several complaints at once, demanding that these works be removed from YouTube immediately. Including the rhymed text of Shakespeare. The essence of the claims is that "this content illegally uses AI to impersonate the voice of our client." On the other hand, Shakespeare's work is a national treasure. And it's strange to remove it because of copyright issues.
Questions arise as to what exactly is being violated here if a celebrity-based synthesized voice is simply reciting original content. Note that after initially deleting the videos, YouTube restored them. It is precisely because of the insufficiently convincing arguments on the part of the copyright holders about the violation of the rights of Jay Z.
It will be interesting to hear your opinion on the creation of new works using cloud AI, as well as who still has the rights to these works. Shall we discuss?
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Music created by AI is
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31,7%Interesting13
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12,2%Not interested5
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56,1%I haven't listened to the whole human one yet23
Voted by 41 users. 4 users abstained.
Who owns the music created by AI
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48,6%AI Developers18
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8,1%Celebrities whose voice was used for synthesis3
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40,5%Society15
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2,7%Your choice in the comments
37 users voted. 8 users abstained.
Source: habr.com