Can AI write lyrics as good as humans? This study says it might be better

Uh-oh.

Artificial intelligence is a huge growth area, including the space that everyone said could only be handled by humans: writing meaningful and emotional song lyrics.

British firm TickPick grabbed 1,000 songs from a variety of genres (pop, country, hip-hop) to train AI programs on how to write lyrics. They then surveyed a thousand meatbags to rank the work of the robots. What did they think? And could they tell the difference between lyrics written by a machine and those written by a human?

When the results came back, 39.6% of those surveyed said that the AI-generated lyrics were more emotional. Overall, though human-bred lyrics were still favoured.

AI has a hard time with rap and hip-hop. Pop was a little less tough, but country was by far the easier genre for AI to ape. Only 12.3% of those in the survey could tell that the country lyrics were fake.

And get this. When presented with some AI lyrics, almost 21% said “Yeah, that sounds like My Chemical Romance.” Only 13% figured out that it was a machine.

TickPick published this infographic.

You can see the whole thing (and see some sample lyrics) here.