Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

OK, but, due respect to Colin Meloy here, this might have been a fair fight. I love the Decemberists and have probably seen them live more than any other band, but lyrically, well, I just looked up when the first thesaurus was published (1852 or thereabouts) because I think Meloy probably uses it. There are some Decemberists songs with excellent lyrics, but there are others where I think an extremely well-trained LLM could hold its own replacing them.

With some extra careful prompting, you could probably get a GPT model to write lyrics that really would read like they belonged on Castaways; you just need more archaisms. You probably could take these prompts and just tell ChatGPT "ok, but replace some of these words with archaic almost-synonyms that sounds like they mean the same thing but really don't" and get 98% of the way there.

This Slate article does a decent job of capturing some of what I mean:

https://slate.com/culture/2009/04/the-eight-most-pretentious...

You might, like me, read this and get these sense that Meloy's lyrical style is probably very trainable/promptable.

PS

I get that I'm talking exclusively about the lyrics, which are of course the easy part of songwriting for ChatGPT. I just think this is a funny particular comparison to draw, this particular band. Which, again, I do love.

I took a whack. Here's a result given Meloy's prompt:

    I've seen the sun rise over distant shores
    Where the birds they sing and the wildflowers grow
    I've traveled to places far and wide
    Where the stories of old still echo in the night

Here's 2 additional prompts later:

    Risen sun I've spied, beyond the unknown shore
    Where sweet the birds sing, and wildflowers ever pour
    To lands of ancient lore, I've journeyed far and wide
    Where tales of olden times, still boom and bellow beside

It's veering into Tolkein, of course, but I think if I spent a half hour with this I could probably get a reasonably reliable prompt formula going. I got it to write "And we'll not sway, like Juliet at the welm." If we constructed a Colin Turing Test, that line would pass.

The next thing to do, of course, is to complete the song and then ask ChatGPT to write a review of it in the style of Brent DiCrescenzo-era Pitchfork.

Honestly, I think that Slate article is just pure lazy snark, zero analysis.

Literally just points out things like object-verb inversion and large words and pretends they are intrinsically bad.

Look, if you don't like it, that's fine, but you're going to have to do a lot more work than "Ha! That word isn't in common use!" to convince me that it's bad.

I'm not so much saying that it's great criticism, so much as that if you took those observations and built prompts around them, you could make a song that sounded much more like Colin Meloy.

The formula is something like:

* Start with a Smiths song

* Make it melancholy.

* Rewrite all the references and allusions so that they jarringly alternate between Chaucer era early English lit and Victorian Gothic.

* Deliberately invert subject-verb order in places to make things sound more poetic.

* Employ archaic synonyms.

* Employ multi-line alliteration.

Point taken, it is indeed easy to ape anything with a distinctive style...

Seurat paints with points, Hemingway writes in short sentences, Hitchcock shoots train scenes and dutch angles.

If LLMs can do anything, it's maybe copy style. But the end result won't be better than the worst parodies you'd find.

Sidenote: If there's something that I dislike irrationally, it's bad parody. Good parody has something to say. Bad parody is someone making something because they think they're awfully clever for "cracking the code" of some artist because they can describe overt style and themes.

Sorta like the person who thinks the entire appeal of magic is figuring out how an illusion is performed.

Do, if you just keep working on it and telling it exactly what to do, is it really replacing human intelligence?

You sound like a prompt engineer.

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