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Oracle AI's Eurovision horror show: How bad can it be? Yep. Badder
'Baby by myself the stain grows more obvious...'
An Oracle AI bot, in collaboration with poet and programmer Eran Hadas, has spewed out an alleged song based on dozens of Eurovision entries.
Eurovision songs are already infamously awful so forcing the poor bot to listen to hundreds of previous entries might one day be seen as an act of real cruelty. Our future robotic overlords will likely severely punish everyone at Oracle involved in this barbaric experiment.
Despite the burden of the maxim "garbage in, garbage out", the melody, composed using software developed by Oracle – and lyrics – spat out by a deep learning algo developed by Hadas – of Blue Jeans and Bloody Tears are at times no worse than actual Eurovision songs.
But then a selection of apparently non-AI created lyrics from this year include this from finalists Belarus: "Put your favourite sneakers on / And show your emotions on the floor / Add hashtag to find ya."
Or Germany's frankly disturbing: "Tired of competing / I tried to hold you under / But honey you kept breathing"
Given this fierce competition, the efforts, unveiled at Oracle Cloud Day, aren't bad at all.
The robo-ditty starts strongly:
I am lost when I am with you / There is no hesitation in your eyes.
Baby bye bye bye / Oh bye bye bye.
But the bot-bard then veers suddenly and wildly offtrack with:
Baby by myself the stain grows more obvious.
Thankfully, our machine minstrel recovers well from this sticky image with:
In this pain of the bird who's flying over roses of sadness.
After the refrain we are rewarded with an image both touching and profound:
Baby summer's gone / It’s gone for the both of us.
Tears will always have wet eyes, I will cry but I will survive.
In textbook Eurovision style we get a key change before the chorus:
Blue jeans and bloody tears / Blue jeans and bloody tears / There's no life without your life in misery...
The bot wrote the words and melody but got some performance help from a human singer.
There's another three minutes of this available on YouTube:
We would like to offer our heartfelt thanks to Popbitch's in-depth guide to the competition, which saved us listening to all 26 finalists.
Their scribes also fingered this effort from last year's Lithuanian entry as a potential century-topping lyrical effort: "Because of my shoes I'm wearing today / One is called love / The other is pain."
The full guide is available here; the final is tomorrow (Saturday) night. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
