A neural network enthusiast has shared the hilarious results of an experiment to let an AI write Christmas carols.
With mentions of reindeer, jingle bells, and even some ‘Fa la la la’s’, it may have gotten some things right – but, it’s doubtful anyone will be singing these songs around the tree.
The neural network, starting with no knowledge of what Christmas carols are, created songs filled with bizarre and nonsensical phrases, from ‘Hurry Christmas to you,’ to ‘Santa baby, and Dancer, and Curry down.’
With mentions of reindeer, jingle bells, and even some ‘Fa la la la’s’, it may have gotten some things right – but, it’s doubtful anyone will be singing these songs around the tree. Stock image
‘King of toys and hippopotamuses [sic] full of the light of that stood at the dear Son of Santa Claus,’ one hilarious verse reads.
‘He was born in a wonderful Christmas tree.’
Others took a more traditional approach to the subject matter:
‘The holly bears a berry and reindeer. He was born today! And Santa baby bore sweet Jesus Christ, And the chimney the angels sing.’
The AI Christmas songs are the latest results from research scientist Janelle Shane, who often trains neural networks on popular content, from beer names to Harry Potter spells, with side-splitting outcomes.
In a blog post, Shane explains that the AI was given ‘no instructions’ on what it would be writing.
As a result, it may come as little surprise that the neural network produced carols such as:
‘Happy Holiday. When the snowflakes will call the world wakes to bring. Glory bears and asses the air the angels sang. And Christmas tree.’
To train the neural network, Shane fed it roughly 240 carols, collected by the Times of London and reader Erik Svensson.
A neural network researcher has shared the hilarious results of an experiment to let an AI write Christmas carols. In a blog post , Shane explains that the AI was given ‘no instructions’ on what it would be writing. Stock image
This included both traditional and modern carols, ‘from ‘What Child is This?’ to ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’,’ Shane notes.
At first, the creations churned out by the neural network make no sense at all, with various letters arranged with no organization.
Eventually, however, it began to create more recognizably Christmas-themed verses, as it refined its rules.
‘When the neural network begins learning, it starts with a set of random rules about how to put one let after another to make a Christmas carol,’ Shane explains in the blog post.
‘Since they are random, they are terrible rules, and when the neural network tries to apply them, it gets junk.
‘But it can check its rules against the real songs in its database and then make little tweaks to them that make them work slightly better.’
For some reason, the researcher notes, it included its own words that did not appear in the training set, such as Curry and Dingle.
And, while the word sandman was only mentioned once in the dataset, it was a common feature of the AI’s carols:
‘The sandman bright before Him,’ the AI wrote in one example.
‘The holly bears a berry bears. And star in the snow is born today! The sandman so love to seek the world. The sandman so love so deep and sing and the sun.’