On this webpage, you will meet two programs, love.ck and dnb.ck. Each of these uses pre-trained word vectors to generate a “poem” and prints it out along with some interesting musical ideas. Is this poetry? Is this even music? These are all good questions. But before we think about it, let’s meet these programs.
This program prints out “loveis_____” a bunch of times in the shape of a heart, where the _____ are the 100ish closest words to love in the vector space. I intended for this program to look and sound like a computer learning about the concept of love. As it absorbs these various definitions of love, the notes that the machine outputs are progressively less microtonal and start to use more and more consonant intervals. A clarinet major chord emerges from the dark as the machine begins to understand that phenomenal experience of human love.
This program explores how we can convert words into a drum and bass beat in probably the worst way possible. First, this program asks for the user to input two words, let’s say “apple” and “Titanic.” Then the program outputs a poem that explores the words that linearly interpolate between these two words using their word vector space. Variations are introduced into the beat by measuring the current words’ relative closeness to various seemingly random words. For instance, the tempo of the beat is determined by the poem’s trajectory and how close it approaches the words “frantic” and “calm”. If for example “apple” is much calmer than “titanic”, then the poem will start slow and speed up over time. The pitch of the drum samples is determined in part by the words’ distance to “wet” and “sharp”, and the dropout rate of various sequencer beats is determined by the words’ distance to “pizza” and “hypocrite” (very logical obviously).
Next, meet love.ck:
So what have these programs taught me about AI and art? One, that they are really good at making CCRMAcore. Two, I have a lot to learn about this intersection of the two fields. I don’t know what art is, and I don’t really know what AI is either, so how am I supposed to make any sense of the intersection? What I enjoyed in this process was the ability to use AI as a tool for creative expression. At no point did AI “make” any of these poems (as much as I wish I could say it did and that I’m not just a terrible poet), rather, the AI was simply the medium I used for expression. Especially in the love case, I think the poem says something about humanity, love, and the ideas we have about love. But these programs have a long way to go before they are being creative. The way I view love.ck is that it used a lot of complicated math to output a top 100 list of concepts we have about love, along with some aesthetic bits that I added.
I still felt very in control of both of these programs. This is something that gives me comfort. I am terrified of the day that I truly believe that AI is being creative. What role, then, do I play in the creative process? I liked being at the helm of this project. I liked being able to tweak how the AI tools were being used and the various parameters associated with them. I don’t think this kind of use of AI is what we should be scared of. We should be scared of when the AI starts writing poetry without us telling it to.