I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song

And I recorded it. Here's "Sailor's Song."

Don’t question the artist

Imagine a future, if you will, in which us songwriters don’t have to sit around in our drafty garrets, plumbing the depths of our pain and misery for the public’s entertainment and enjoyment. A future where creative inspiration is at our very fingertips, right past our keyboards on our laptop screens, where we creatives can sit back and let robots do all the heavy emotional lifting for us.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, that future is now.

As you’re probably aware, this thing called ChatGPT was unveiled recently — it’s what they call a “conversational AI” and I imagine that, very soon, it will be finding its way into our every daily interaction with the internet. On a lark, I signed up for access to ChatGPT a few weeks ago. I dabbled, I asked it a few questions. It was funny. You could ask it to tell you a story; you could ask it if Sanyo ductless mini-splits are compatible with other line sets other than its own. It will happily oblige on both accounts.

Then I thought: what if it could write a song for me?

So I asked it:

Seconds later, this is what it wrote:

It went on. There were two verses, a chorus, a bridge and an outro. I’m not sure how it decided this was Decemberist-y, but I get it. It’s like what someone might think a Decemberists song sounded like if they’d skimmed a few reviews, observed some fairly skin-deep Twitter hot takes. It’s got sailors and lighthouses and battles at sea. I get it. Fine.

On a surface level, it looked like a song. It had rhyming couplets, it followed basic song constructions. But I needed more information. I needed chords.

So that’s kind of wild. Not only can this AI write out a convincing-looking song lyric, but it can put together chords that, at least at first glance, kind of work. I mean, the verse progression’s got the classic pattern: the root chord, the 4 and the 5. It’s got the minor fall and the major lift. It pleases the Lord.

The AI knows that the chorus needs to have a change — so it just rearranges the four chords from the verse. And then it knows that the bridge should be a further tweak — it introduces the minor as the first chord.

But is it any good? I still needed more information, so I asked it:

This is what it gave me:

Verse 1:
C - G - Am - F
In a town by the sea, with a lighthouse tall
C - G - F - C
Where the ships do come, and the seagulls call
I met a man with a heart full of dreams
He told me stories of the sea and its schemes

Chorus:
G - Am - F - C
Of sailors brave, and adventures untold
G - Am - F - C
Of a life on the waves, and a heart grown old
G - Am - F - C
Of a world of discovery, waiting to be sought
G - Am - F - C
In a song that will live, when he is not

Verse 2:
C - G - Am - F
He sang of voyages, and battles at sea
C - G - F - C
Of sea shanties, and storms that rage wild and free
With melodies that echoes through the mist
And took me to a world, that I have missed

Chorus:
G - Am - F - C
Of sailors brave, and adventures untold
G - Am - F - C
Of a life on the waves, and a heart grown old
G - Am - F - C
Of a world of discovery, waiting to be sought
G - Am - F - C
In a song that will live, when he is not

Bridge:
Am - F - C - G
And I know that this man's song will stay
Am - F - C - G
As a lighthouse's beam, to guide me on my way
Am - F - C - G
For in his voice, I heard a longing heart
Am - F - C - G
And a tale that will start, a brand new part

Chorus:
G - Am - F - C
Of sailors brave, and adventures untold
G - Am - F - C
Of a life on the waves, and a heart grown old
G - Am - F - C
Of a world of discovery, waiting to be sought
G - Am - F - C
In a song that will live, when he is not

Outro:
C - G - Am - F
So let us sing, of this man's sweet sound
C - G - F - C
And let our hearts and our feet hit the ground
C - G - Am - F
For in this place, we're free from all our fears
C - G - F - C
And his song takes us, to our wildest dreams.

It was a bit of a headscratcher. It wasn’t able to format it in such a way that it was clear when the chords changed, so I had to guess. The verses were particularly baffling, with four of the eight chord changes happening on the first line, the second four happening over the next three lines. I thought it was maybe a mistake; I asked it to write them out a few more times, but each time they came back the same. That was how the song went, goddamn it.

ChatGPT doesn’t really have the wherewithal to write a melody — though I’ve seen people online try to make it do it — but that was fine, because I don’t really have the wherewithal to read music. So I had to guess what the melody of the lines would be, based on the chording.

Anyway, this is what I arrived at, my recording of a Decemberists song written by an AI, recorded by me:

I asked ChatGPT what they were calling their creation, and they said “Sailor’s Song,” which was awfully basic, but you can’t account for taste.

For the record, this is a remarkably mediocre song. I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible song, though it really flirts with terribleness. No, it’s got some basics down: it (mostly) rhymes in all the right places (though that last couplet is a real doozy), it uses a chord progression (I-V-vi-IV) that is enshrined in more hits from the western pop canon than I care to count. But I think you’d agree that there’s something lacking, beyond the little obvious glitches — the missed or repeated rhymes, the grammatical mistakes, the overall banality of the content. Getting the song down, I had to fight every impulse to better the song, to make it resolve where it doesn’t otherwise, to massage out the weirdnesses. I wanted to stay as true to its creator’s vision as possible, and at the end, there’s just something missing. I want to say that ChatGPT lacks intuition. That’s one thing an AI can’t have, intuition. It has data, it has information, but it has no intuition. One thing I learned from this exercise: so much of songwriting, of writing writing, of creating, comes down to the creator’s intuition, the subtle changes that aren’t written as a rule anywhere — you just know it to be right, to be true. That’s one thing an AI can’t glean from the internet.

So alas, alack, looks like I’ll be writing my own songs for the foreseeable future…