Our Artificial Intelligence systems are getting smarter and smarter. But in some cases the results can be quite unsettling. Take for instance Google’s DeepDream technology which can generate nightmarish looking images which gives an insight into how artificial neural networks view the world and recognise objects within images.
This time though, scientists at the University of Toronto have programmed an AI to get into the festive cheer and write a Christmas song. And whilst I don’t think there’s any chance at all that it will top the charts this Christmas, I do think the result is pretty disturbing. I guess that’s what you get though when you completely leave AI to its own devices. Humans had very little to do with composing this song.
To create this bizarre Christmas carol, scientists fed in a hundred hours of online music into a neural network and this enabled it to generate ‘listenable’ music which included a melody, instruments and drums at around 120 beats per minute.
A second neural network was then fed a collection of photographs and their captions. The neural network then learned how specific words were linked to visual patterns and object. Then once the network was fed an image it hadn’t seen before, it generated relevant lyrics and sang them.
So what was the result of putting the two together? A beautiful song probably about the inevitable end of the human race.
Happy Christmas everyone from the year 3000 🙂