Evan Greer releases Automated Christmas Joy, a weird EP of Christmas music with lyrics written by Chat GPT. Proceeds benefit FFTF!

For immediate release: December 19, 2022

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The frighteningly catchy album is a benefit for Fight for the Future’s campaign work fighting for regulation of harmful AI

Queer indie punk singer/songwriter and digital rights activist Evan Greer has released Automated Christmas Joy, a four song EP where the lyrics were written by Chat GPT and then set to music and recorded by Greer. The musician used prompts like “Write a Christmas Song in the style of Blink 182,” “Write a song called ‘Christmas at the Gay Bar,” and “Write a Christmas song where Santa fights the fascists,” to generate the lyrics.

Listen to the album here: https://evangreer.bandcamp.com/album/automated-christmas-joy 

The album is only available on Bandcamp and all proceeds will benefit Fight for the Future, the nonprofit Greer works as a director, to support the organization’s work fighting against harmful uses of AI and campaigning for strict regulation.

“I kind of hate everything about this,” said Evan Greer (she/her), “I honestly don’t know why I made this. Partly to distract myself and cope with holiday depression, partly as a commentary on the way that artificial intelligence is invading the art and music world, and partly because I kind of love Christmas music, but also most Christmas music sort of sounds like it was written by an AI, since it’s so formulaic and commercialized.”

The lyrics to all the songs were written using Chat GPT, but for some songs (mostly Christmas at the Gay Bar and Santa vs the Fascists), Greer would “regenerate” the results numerous times and then piece together a song from the “best” (worst?) sections the AI spat out.

“There are some really funny moments where you can see the AI totally failing and succeeding at the same time, like when it spits out a line about ‘Santa’s mighty sack,’” added Greer, “It was also pretty dystopian and weird how when I asked it to write a song about Christmas at the gay bar, the AI clearly returned results informed by the recent wave of violence against LGBTQ+ people. I’m genuinely not sure what kind of impact this technology is going to have on our society. It scares me, but also I kinda can’t look away. In the end, this is why we need regulation that protects vulnerable people and prohibits harmful uses of AI. Fight for the Future does that work all year round, so I decided if I was going to release this monstrosity, I’d use it to raise funds for our work around AI regulation.”

Here’s the four song track list, and the Chat GPT prompts used to generate each song:

  1. This Holiday’s a Hit (“Write a Christmas song in the style of Blink-182”)
  2. Christmas at the Gay Bar (“Write a song called Christmas at the Gay Bar”)
  3. Santa Fights the Fascists (“Write a Christmas song where Santa fights the fascists”)
  4. Christmas in Boston (“Write a Christmas song set in Boston”)

The EP is called “Automated Christmas Joy” and it’s out today on Bandcamp.

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