Folk-punk singer and Fight for the Future activist Evan Greer had a fun idea for spreading holiday cheer: an EP of Christmas songs, with lyrics written by ChatGPT, using prompts like "Christmas at the Gay Bar" "Santa fights the fascists" and "A Christmas Song in the style of Blink-182." And honestly: it's delightful! Here's what Greer had to say about it:
"I kind of hate everything about this," said Evan Greer (she/her), "I honestly don't know why I made this. Partly to distract myself and cope with holiday depression, partly as a commentary on the way that artificial intelligence is invading the art and music world, and partly because I kind of love Christmas music, but also most Christmas music sort of sounds like it was written by an AI, since it's so formulaic and commercialized."
"There are some really funny moments where you can see the AI totally failing and succeeding at the same time, like when it spits out a line about 'Santa's mighty sack,'" added Greer, "It was also pretty dystopian and weird how when I asked it to write a song about Christmas at the gay bar, the AI clearly returned results informed by the recent wave of violence against LGBTQ+ people. I'm genuinely not sure what kind of impact this technology is going to have on our society. It scares me, but also I kinda can't look away. In the end, this is why we need regulation that protects vulnerable people and prohibits harmful uses of AI. Fight for the Future does that work all year round, so I decided if I was going to release this monstrosity, I'd use it to raise funds for our work around AI regulation."
You can listen to the album below via Bandcamp; if you choose to buy it, all proceeds go directly to Fight for the Future.
