Robots Sing For Death and Revolution at Eurovision’s AI Contest
An Australian team called “Uncanny Valley” won the inaugural Eurovision AI song contest for their song “Beautiful the World”
(Bloomberg) -- An Australian team called “Uncanny Valley” won the inaugural Eurovision AI song contest for their song “Beautiful the World,” even with lyrics like “dreams still live on the wings of happiness.”
The usual Eurovision contest, which would’ve been gearing up in Rotterdam now, has been canceled. In its place, 13 teams of computer scientists, artists and academics were invited to compete using artificial intelligence to write original songs, feeding their programs everything from pop ballads to folk music to animal noises.
The scores were decided jointly by a panel of judges and 12,000 online votes in a live-stream event on Tuesday by Dutch broadcaster VPRO, which organized the competition.
Australia’s poppy song was written with AI trained on previous Eurovision hits along with contributions from a neural network fed samples of noises made by koalas, kookaburras and Tasmanian devils.
But not all of the programs were so upbeat. Second place and the judges’ favorite was a composition from Germany’s Dadabots x Portrait XO team. It begins as a love song before taking a dark turn toward human extinction. The group, whose members are originally from the U.S. but were working in Berlin, generated “nonsensical babbling” from 1950s acapellas and tried to pick out a story. They created the rest with, among other things, death metal lyrics and a fake news generator.
Death is the norm in this world
Only now humans are brought to the slaughter
Losing your life, every day
Extinction is the only way-- “I’ll Marry You, Punk Come”
The Dutch team “Can AI Kick It” submitted an entry that called for a “revolution” and to “Kill the government. Kill the system.” In addition to using pop music and national folk music for the song, the team created a lyric generator that sampled from Reddit. The program also invented a word, Abbus, used as the song’s title. When asked, the AI said it meant “a nascent cloud.”
AI is being increasingly incorporated into music creation -- from programs that can create jingles for advertisements to fully formed acts likeYona, an AI with a teenage girlavatar created by by London-based company Auxuman. She can be licensed for performances.
The teams used varying degrees of intervention -- from including human producers and vocalists and curating their programs’ output to letting the software take control with as little of their interference as possible. The French team Algomus & Friends combined human composition and edited versions of AI-created music and lyrics for a song that sounds more like a typical Eurovision entry. Sweden’s algorithm generated the melody and lyrics together for dance song “Come To Ge Ther.”
We Come to ge ther
As we dance
When we go get lost
That’s how we go whenA-I will sing and a dance there will be
Our love, it feels like is growing in me-- “Come To Ge Ther”
Meanwhile, for Switzerland’s aptly named song “Painful Words,” the creators said: “Faced with the choice between making an accessible song with quite a few human interventions, or experimenting with as much AI as possible and then delivering a worse-sounding song, we chose the latter.”
They came in last.
Nul Points
The win was Australia’s first in a Eurovision contest. The country, which has a large Eurovision fan base, was invited to participate in 2015 to commemorate its 60th anniversary and kept showing up ever since.
Traditionally, the Eurovision final is an eclectic mix of earnest Swedish pop stars, Polish milk maids and Finnish death metal bands. Hosted by enthusiastic young continentals, songs are scored by a combination of dial-in votes from viewers and jurists representing the participating countries. Voting is famously political -- the U.K. hasn’t won in more than two decades, and neighboring countries often give each other top marks -- and goes on forever. It’s a true celebration of Europe, and, now, Australia.
Eurovision was meant to be held in Rotterdam this year after Dutch artist Duncan Laurence won in 2019 with his song “Arcade.”
“There is glitter, there is a smoke machine, there will be love, peace and modulations,” said Belgian comedian Lieven Scheire, the host of the AI song contest. “Everything for a wonderful Eurovision evening.”
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