AI Writes Bizarre Christmas Carol

While us fleshbags are mired in our own Christmas preparations, it would be easy to forget about the robots. Do they know it’s Christmas? At least one does, and it has written a new Christmas carol to commemorate the occasion. Researchers from the University of Toronto showed a picture of a Christmas tree to its custom deep learning AI – powered by NVIDIA’s CUDA, Tesla K40 GPUs, and cuDNN – known as “neural karaoke.” The AI then used the image as the basis to write a little Christmas-themed ditty. If you’ve seen creative content generated by an AI, you can probably guess how weird the result is:

Lyrics:

♫ Lots to decorate the room

The Christmas tree is filled with flowers

I swear it’s Christmas Eve

I hope that’s what you say

The best Christmas present in the world is a blessing

I’ve always been there for the rest of our lives

A-hundred-and-a-half hours ago

I’m glad to meet you

I can hear the music coming from the hall

A fairy tale

A Christmas tree

There are lots and lots of flowers ♫

Neural Karaoke is part of a wider project to produce procedurally generated music and lyrics, and even choreograph dance routines (sadly absent from the Christmas carol above). As part of its training, Neural Karaoke has listened to over 100 hours of music online. It uses that education to create its own original pieces.

“We are used to thinking about AI for robotics and things like that. The question now is what can AI do for us?” Raquel Urtasun, Associate Professor in Machine Learning and Computer Vision at Toronto’s computer science lab, told The Guardian.

“You can imagine having an AI channel on Pandora or Spotify that generates music, or takes people’s pictures and sings about them,” her colleague Sanja Fidler added. “It’s about what can deep learning do these days to make life more fun?”