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Notebook Thursday: Rise of the Machines (Guest Post)

4/20/2023

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Charlie O'Brien is a founding member of The Unswept, who play International Pop Overthrow on Sunday, April 25, at Montrose Saloon.
ChatGPT has only been publicly available since November 2022, and I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t constantly seeing shared attempts at getting the machine to write something creative. Once I discovered “write a Wikipedia-style entry about…” as a prompt, the Unswept’s band text thread quickly became a place to share hallucinatory alternate histories of the band (which have a troubling tendency of killing off Ryan).

I get it—the novelty of entering a prompt and seeing coherent text appear near-instantaneously is undeniable, and it’s a pretty short leap from there to “I wonder if this thing can write songs.” And it can— sorta. A supercomputer trained on the right data can emulate the technical formalities and structure of a poem or set of lyrics (such as the syllable count or the rhyme scheme), but they usually only approach emotional resonance incidentally or accidentally. Far more often, it will create a simplified pastiche of pre-existing art, devoid of the elements that make the original interesting (Colin Meloy wrote that ChatGPT’s new Decemberists song is “remarkably mediocre,” while Nick Cave assessed an AI-generated Nick Cave song as being “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”).

It’s foolhardy to expect this new generation of large language models to instantly generate meaningful, finished art. But what if we view these tools as collaborators rather than an instant song factory—less an outsourcing of creative work and more an infinitely renewable deck of oblique strategies? As with most machines, the best output tends to come from the most refined input. So rather than tasking ChatGPT with creating an idea from scratch, I figured I at least needed to give it a title.

I first typed the phrase “time is running away from me” in an email at work—I was searching for a different figure of speech (perhaps “time is catching up with me”), but that’s what came out instead. I had a vague idea for a melody behind those words, a vague sense of what the title implied (a subtle indictment of the time crunch that capitalism puts us all into?), and a spare 10 minutes. So I directed my web browser to ChatGPT, performed a CAPTCHA to prove that I myself wasn’t a robot, typed "write a buncha verses of an uptempo rock song called Time Is Running Away From Me about losing track of goals and deadlines because of the inexorable passage of time” and hit enter. Ten seconds later, I was staring at a lyric sheet:

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Notebook Thursday: Chucking It All, Almost

4/6/2023

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I found the first draft of "Got Lucky" this week, and decided to post it here because—though I remembered that the song needed revision—I had forgotten it was such a mess. This shows just how much I had to throw away to arrive at the final version.

At upper right is the chorus. If you read music, you might notice that the notes against the D and Bm chords aren't the recorded melody—they're the harmony that Charlie sings. I kept jumping up to the F# when I played the song, and it took a while to figure out that it wasn't actually a mistake. (Charlie says "Alone Again Or" developed this way too.) 

The early verses I might as well have ripped out of the notebook entirely. ("No one ever swept me up / They always swiped away"? Eesh.) At top left are a bunch of rhymes I didn't use. A little lower is the part where I realized I'd accidentally plagiarized a rhyme from "9 to 5." On the right things get Westerberg-ish with "All they ever took from me was everything I owned," which might be worth using in some other song. At the bottom is "They'll tell you there's a lid for every pot / That's how you know you've lost the plot." Which I don't hate, but perhaps ought to. Anyway, it's not in the final song.
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The page was crowded enough with competing ideas that I had to start a new one. Every so often it happens that way. I used a different notebook—bigger, with more white space—and copied only the lines I was pretty sure I wanted to keep. I filled in the other stuff later (which you can tell, since the ink color is different). And this version, too, had a couple of things that didn't take.
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Things I kept from the first draft: 
  1. The title
  2. The bridge (still my favorite part)
  3. The chord progression
  4. The lyrics for the first verse (which you can tell was a late-breaking idea, by the way it's wedged into the space in the gutter of the first notebook)
Even the bottom version isn't final, because it doesn't have the false Bm ending—that was a suggestion from Charlie the first time I brought it to the whole band. Every so often, finishing a song takes a level of persistence that verges on foolhardy. It's kind of fitting that it happened with this one, a song about striking gold after years of striking out.

​The Unswept will play "Got Lucky" in their April 23 set at International Pop Overthrow, Montrose Saloon, Chicago.
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    Liz Bagby

    Songwriter & multidisciplinary artist

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