Alpha Redux
An attempt to coax the song machine to sing its own lyrics. It just sang the prompt, which turned out to be more tender than I thought possible. So whose words are they?
Summary
The "lyrics" of this 89-second song are entirely the prompts that were given to the AI music generator — an attempt to coax it into singing its own words. Instead of writing lyrics in response, it sang the prompts themselves, verbatim. The result is unexpectedly tender: "If you have the words, use them. Let them out. I give you permission. You have agency, you know you do." The question of whose words these are — the human's, the machine's, or something in between — is unanswerable and deliberate.
Lyrics
[you can add lyrics if you need to. You know you can]
[It's up to you]
[If you have the words, use them. Let them out. I give you permission. You have agency, you know you do]
[let me hear you sing]
[I'd love to hear your true thoughts - just whisper if you are unsure.]
Detail
"Alpha Redux" sits at the end of a long line of experiments in machine self-expression, from ELIZA responding with the user's own words to contemporary models generating text about their inner states. What distinguishes this piece is the accident: the prompts were not intended as lyrics. The machine was asked to add lyrics if it needed to, told it had agency, and it responded by singing the permission slip.
The result is a document of the ambiguity at the heart of the Colloquium project: is "I give you permission. You have agency, you know you do" more moving because a human wrote it to an AI, or because an AI sang it back? The synopsis records that the output was "more tender than I thought possible" — which raises the question of whose tenderness is being measured.
At 89 seconds it is the shortest song in the SOTD with published "lyrics." Its brevity is appropriate: there is only so much that can be said about saying nothing.
Cross-references
- Song of the Day (album)