Text this number with the name of a musical artist, and an AI responds with lyrics written in that style

Musician and Programmer Sam Agnew decided to spend his quarantine time automating new music creation by popular artist, with the help of OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 language modelling system. As he explains on Twilio:

With concerts canceled and many artists being unable to release new music, people around the world are missing their favorite bands. What if you could fill that void by bringing any band or artist's lyrical style home with Python code to generate new songs?

Try texting the name of your favorite artist to +1 (315) 65-LYRICS (+1 315 659-7427) or +44 7401 193427 if you're in the UK to get lyrics in their style, and continue reading to find out how to program this yourself!

Agnew also provides instructions for how to play around with and customize the Open AI library, if you want to try your own similar experiments.

If I didn't have a newborn, I'd probably spend some time on that myself. But instead, I've been using those latenight screaming wakeups to text the LyricBot and see what it can come up with. And I'm (mostly) pretty impressed!

Here's a few options it gave me for Bruce Springsteen:

So many nights
I've been waiting for the time
To lay it all on the line
And tell you how I feel inside.
If love is blind, then I must be crazy, yeah.
Why else would I want you so bad?

Another one gone
Another one gone
Another one gone and another one gone too

I've been up and down this highway
Takin' whatever came my way
I've been down to Mexico
And I've heard those fiddles play
I can tell you stories, you won't believe
About things I'd rather not say

But the one thing I know is true, girl, don't let 'em fool you with their lies about a man and his guitar.

We got a right to pick up our marbles and go home

We got a right to leave if we want to

We got a right to pick up our marbles and go home

Phoebe Bridgers:

I want to start a show band, play all the hits and quit. And have a couple drinks and drive around, in my car with you.

I want to start a show band, play all the hits and quit. And have a couple drinks and drive around, in my car with you.

I want to drive around in my car with you. You're so good looking that I can't look at you. But if I did, I'd probably crash the car into something just so we could die together.

You could make a million mistakes

You could always give up on Friday night

You could fall in love with a stranger's face

And spend your life in the game of pretend You could let all of your friends down again

But you're too good at both pretending and lying and I know you won't see it coming when it finally lands But I'll always be here when you need me to be If you're lost out in the woods tonight I'll carry your fire If you're lost out in the woods tonight I'll carry your fire But if you ask me to, I will always say yes And I will follow where you're going And I will follow where you're going

 This Mountain Goats one is frighteningly accurate:

I wanna be an astronaut
A real one, not a fake one
I wanna ride in a rocket pack
And shoot myself into space

One day I'll be an astronaut
I promise this to you
I don't want to be famous, I don't want to be rich, I just want to be in outer space

Now the closest I've ever been to outer space is watching movies and playing games with my friends on my computer and eating at Taco Bell and not believing for a second that anything that goes on there is real or possible

As was Wilco:

I'm going out to the desert
I'm going out to the desert this weekend
To see what I can find there to show me a sign
To take me away from here

But I hear you laugh at my plans and I don't know why
'Cause you think that I'll be back in a year or two
You say, "Why don't you just stay here? You're just getting in the way. And talkin' too much."

Well, I'm all packed up and down at the station now. My ticket's been taken by that man who keeps his hand on his gun.

And Radiohead:

The stars are projectors,

Projecting our lives down to this planet Earth.

The stars are projectors,

Projecting our lives down to this planet Earth.

Even Taylor Swift was pretty spot-on:

When you left me standing
There's no way I would have thought I'd be alone

When you left me standing
There's no way I would have thought I'd be alone

But now you're gone and I'm sad and blue
And who knows if I'll ever love again

Oh, when we kissed goodbye I didn't know that it was the last time, last time we'd kiss like that forevermore.

I wish you could tell me why it had to end this way, why did you leave me standing?

I'm so funny when I cry
You say I'm beautiful when I'm naked
You bring me roses when I'm home
And you always know just how to make it better.

You say I love you more than all the stars above, oh baby, hold me closer and don't let go…and now I know what heaven feels like.

There's a place where your dreams are there for you to reach; if you dare to dream it, then you should dare to do it.

I want this forever, never ever end, 'cause our love is the greatest story ever told. You are my greatest story ever told.

I won't subject you to the 20+ samples of Pogues lyrics I got, but suffice to say, they were all perfect.

However, things didn't always go so great. Like when I put my own band in there:

In the AI's defense, we're not a particularly well-known artist, so okay, it just kind of provided some generic lyrics. Okay, fair.

What about an artist that enjoys wide critical acclaim, and is certainly known, even if they're not necessarily popular? Like, say, Fugazi?

Yes, that's a real screenshot of an actual real response I got from the Lyricbot. So either the AI has achieved sentience and was deliberately trolling me … or it was just a hilarious fluke of data luck.

You can play around with the Lyricbot yourself, or even design your own variant on it with the step-by-step instructions below:

Generating Lyrics in the Style of your Favorite Artist with Python, OpenAI's GPT-3 and Twilio SMS [Sam Agnew / Twilio]

Image: Sean Mason / Flickr (CC 2.0)