'Bot Dylan' AI writes its own catchy folk songs

Musicians will be replaced! End of World Near!

[tangor]

Researchers have created a 'Bot Dylan' computer that is capable of writing its own folk music.

The system uses artificial intelligence to compose new tunes after it was trained using 23,000 pieces of Irish folk music.

This allowed the machine to learn the patterns and structures that make for a catchy tune before it created its own pieces of music that we showcased at a concert in London this week.

It marks a significant step forward for the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

At 100,000 tunes created by this AI and probably turning out that many more .... my 300 songs over a 57 year career seems like chump change.

[dailymail.co.uk...]

[keyplyr]

I hope it has a better voice :)

[tangor]

Mine or yours? (winkers)

My voice is a cross between coyotes and bull-frogs, though over the years I've managed to remove most of the frogs.

[keyplyr]

Wasn't this about a Bob Dylan AI computer?

There's no denying Dylan wrote some of the most profound lyric in pop music, but as he got older I had a real difficult time listening to his voice. His intonation had it's own path :)

[LifeinAsia]

I don't know about folk music, but it certainly couldn't be worse than the current crop of pop music!

[keyplyr]

I don't know about folk music, but it...

"Man, all music is folk music. You ain't never heard no horse sing have you?" - Louis Armstrong

[lucy24]

<tangent>
Not long ago I found suchandsuch song referred to as a Canadian folk song. I said, wtf, that's not a folk song, it's by Wade Hemsworth.

Can you call it a folk song if it's got a named human composer?

Can you call it a folk song if it wasn't composed by folks at all? Does it depend on how many people were involved in writing the software?
</tangent>

[keyplyr]

You can call anything anything... meaning there's really no rule about artistic labels*, except possibly by a few snob critics**.

*"Labels are just so the music store clerks know where to put the records." - Frank Zappa

**"With birth of first artist came inevitable afterbirth, the first critic." - Orson Welles

[seoskunk]

The infinite monkey theorem:
Monkeys + Typewriter = Shakespear
AI + Music = Bob Dylan
AI + Rejection = Muddy Waters

[NickMNS]

The problem with the monkey + typewriter theorem is not that the work will or will not be created. Given sufficient iterations the work will have been created a some point. The issue is identifying which of the googols (10**100) of iterations will be Shakespearian.

This then becomes a classification problem, for which, ironically, AI/Machine Learning is well suited.