The singer complains that my congressman, Cliff Bentz, prioritized loyalty to Trump over the interests of his district.
Artificial Intelligence did 99 percent of the work.
It sounds to me like a mix of Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction," 1965, and Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run," 1975. Not as good, of course, but reminiscent of them.
Listen to some of it -- or all of it. It is posted on YouTube. It is four minutes long. The song gets angrier as it progresses.
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I wanted to use a photo of Bentz, taken from the public domain. For some reason the program would not let me use his photo. So I took an drawing of a gray-haired man of about 73 -- Bentz's age. The song suffers from having readers look at this still image rather than a very muscled Bruce Springsteen in a shirt with sleeves cut off, moving with animation on a stage.
ChatGPT would not let me write lyrics about Cliff Bentz or Trump. It said that it avoided commentary of specific personalities. There was an easy workaround. I told ChatGPT to write lyrics about a totally fictional congressman Biff Hence, and a fictional Donald Bump. It happily did so, assuring me each time it made a revision that this was for fictional political figures.
I instructed ChatGPT to write lyrics in three verses, plus a chorus and bridge. I suggested three subjects. I said the song should criticize Bentz for having voted for the Big Beautiful Bill, which will make health insurance unaffordable for a great many people in this district. (Oregon's 2nd District has one of the nation's top concentrations of people getting health insurance through the Obamacare exchanges.) A second criticism was that the Big Beautiful Bill preserved tax cuts for billionaires, which increases the budget deficit. A third criticism was that Bentz was part of the GOP caucus obedient to Trump's demand that the Epstein files be kept sealed.
ChatGPT presented drafts in fewer than five seconds. It offered to make revisions that would either amp up the "protest vibe" or adjust the tone to an easy-going folk style. It inquired if I wanted the text to include more or fewer words that rhymed with "Hence." When the revisions were done, I substituted "Cliff Bentz" for "Biff Hence," and submitted those lyrics to the music application.
The music app instantly matched the music and phrasing to the lyrics and supplied the voice, guitars, and drums that we requested. What astonishing technology!
I am not claiming this is great art. But I wanted to see if AI could produce a listenable protest song at the instructions of a novice. It could.
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9 comments:
Impressive song. I wonder if he's heard it yet. I bet he will. Maybe he'll sue. Then everyone will hear it. He's just afraid of Trump turning against him in the primaries. He wants to keep his job. Well, when his constituents lose their health care, he has to answer why. He's on the losing side and has to face the consequences. The next election will be VERY interesting. For all of them.
Wonderfully adequate song about our congressman from Boise.
Peter, a well done effort that illustrates the problem we are facing in the US today.
It is quite easy to make a believable story or tale for just about anything. Doesn't even have to be true.
What is worse is that too many people lack the ability to separate truth from fiction. Especially goes for some of our media as well as our business and government leaders.
I use AI searches a lot. One thing that is helpful is that my Google AI search results tell me about the different opinions about the results of a particular search term.
And this is going to get worse. Much worse..
Do you live in southern Oregon? The democrats have yet to run a credible candidate against Bentz. Bentz is guaranteed to win next year's election.
Bentz lives in Ontario, Oregon.
Credible job, Cedar Page.
I spent my whole working life building my skill as a computer programmer. I had a great career (and a lot of fun) doing that, and then retired and spent 20 years teaching the skill to others at Portland Community College.
AI can now write code, and enrollments in computer science college programs are dropping because the jobs may no longer be there. I find it quite ironic that we programmers did this to ourselves.
I spent the last 14 years learning how to produce music “by hand,” using a synthesizer and a computer. Now, as Peter has told us, you can use suno.com to create AI music in a few minutes with just a text prompt of the lyrics. So there goes another skill I put significant time and hard work into developing.
Here’s a song I did by hand way back in 2021, before this newfangled technology rolled into the world:
Do You, Mr Woke
I keep wondering what place there will be in society and the economy for everyone whose skills get replaced by AI.
Bentz lives in tRump's pocket. If he responded to questions, which he doesn't, I'm sure he'd tell you that yes, indeed, tRump did win the 2020 election and has lowered prices - don't believe your lyin' eyes.
I liked not our Bentz.
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