10 Drunk Cigarettes

I read a piece in the New York Times that reported:

“A Shocking Country Song Is Dominating TikTok. Is Girly Girl for Real?“10 Drunk Cigarettes” boasts it was made with help from artificial intelligence (Ai). It pairs dark internet humor with a poppy sound that just might find a bigger audience.”

You want to hear it? Click on below and read the lyrics on the video as if you attend karaoke.

To be fair, the melody sounds catchy to me, very much a modern pop song. It’s message consists of destructive and hedonistic behavior. Do five lines of coke? Really? The term “drunken cigarettes” refers to smoking while inebriated.

Girlie Girls’ advertising pitch that they used Ai to make the song intrigued me. So I asked Ai ChatGPT to write a song more to my sensibilities.

I commanded:

“Lyrics for a song patterned after Lady be Good but on jazz and Chinese food”

ChatGPT: Sure! Here’s a playful take on a song inspired by Lady Be Good, but with a jazz and Chinese food twist:

“Jazz and Chinese Food.

Verse
Got my chopsticks ready, the table's set,
Noodles are dancing, it’s a culinary duet.
From dim sum delights to sweet and sour delight,
In this jazzy atmosphere, everything feels right.

Chorus:
Oh, jazz and Chinese food, what a perfect tune,
Wontons and melodies, under the silver moon.”

Ouch.

Such trite and silly lyrics: “Under the silver moon, noodles are dancing, sweet and sour delight. And Forced rhyming.

ChatGPT didn’t even follow Lady be Good’s musical structure, a fault that didn’t surprise me.

Ai in writing mimics knowledge, doesn’t create it, by web-searching for common phrases related to the topic requested, and then using complex statistical algorithms including; multivariate regression, analysis of variance, bootstrapping, near networks, and cluster analysis, all of which I have used in my research. You don’t need to know what these are, but just remember Ai uses statistics to do what it does.

Many people use Ai a lot now to write friction or prose. Commercial publishers and Kindle Direct Press have been flooded by submissions of crappy Ai novels and stories. Teachers and university professors have to determine if Ai wrote submissions students hand in.

I think I could identify Ai just in the reading, given its lack of unique craftsmanship. The Ai fiction I accessed to research this post bored me because it had no heart, clear messaging, or plots that surprised me.  It clearly seemed derivative and a lot so.

The non-fiction Ai I read seldom added anything I didn’t already know on familiar topics. But it did turnout decent condolence messages, thank you notes, birthday wishes, application letters (kind of) and the like.

Amazon’s Alexis uses a form of Ai to learn how their owners interact with it. “Her,” one of my favorite movies, might soon become reality. In the film, An Ai driven operating system develops intimate relationships with its owner (how I won’t tell you). Imagine how close you could get to your Alexis if it sounds like husky and seductive like Scarlet Johansen, the computer’s voice in Her. Hooah!

But it still uses only statistics to figure out things based on previous information. It cannot create from a human sense. I wonder if the Ai chess program on Delta’s airline entertainment system (master level) could still beat me if it used Grandmaster Bobbie Fisher’s suggestion to flip the positions of the knights and bishops on the board. Doing that would nix using chess historical games for anything. Ai would have to THINK from the rules alone. Good luck.

On the very positive side, Ai well assists more and more technical parts of our society to success, from self driving cars to unloading container ships. Pfizer even used Ai to create the new covid vaccine I got yesterday.

I tried writing lyrics for a new song using the same instructions I gave ChatGPT.

“George Gershwin Meets Chinese Food”

Verse

I’m told that the food we eat

Controls our health, no lie

That excess fat, salt, sugar, and meat

Increases how fast we die.

So, I must change my ways

To live more days.

Can jazz that catches my attention span

Make me live as a better man?…..sooo

Chorus

Bring me jazz, please oh do

And bring me too, good Chinese food.

Quiet Gershwin, please oh do.

And above all, no junk food.

We need some serious sophistication

To change our diet without hesitation.

Bring me Gershwin and Chinese food.

Bring them together, please do.”

How did I construct the lyrics? I wanted to creatively (that’s the operative word) make the point that eating good Chinese food and listening to quiet jazz serves you better to control diet than eating junk food while listening to pop music.

I was going to sing and play my revisionist Lady be Good, but I respect the Gershwin brothers far too much to parody of one of their most famous songs. I want to remember it as it is. Whenever I hear the William Tell Overture, my mind still immediately thinks of “Hi ho Silver!” The different context for the melody when I was a kid watching TV ruined listening to it as a classic piece forever. Readers who don’t know what I’m talking about, look it up. :-)

I instead offer a version of Lady Be Good recorded by Buck and Bubbles near the time the Gershwins wrote it in 1933. Ella Fitzgerald later recorded a very famous cover of it you can also find on youtube. Enjoy.