SONG:
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: The Markup, 1 May 2023, “The Very Hungry Algorithm: Bedtime with ChatGPT,” as used in the post “How do you feel when the AI starts reading your young children their bedtime stories?”
ABSTRACT:
This is another attempt to create a song in a genre I think is real but might have entirely made up. I’ve started calling it “urban wyrd,” although I think the folk horror folks have used that phrase to mean something else. I first seized on this notional genre when I heard the short-lived band Ipso Facto sing “Harmonise” in 2008 or 2009, and realized that, first, the song didn’t really fit into a lot of categories people tried to put it in (it wasn’t goth, wasn’t post-punk, wasn’t 60s-style psychedelia or garage rock, certainly wasn’t electroclash or emo) and yet, second, that it very much fit in with other songs like “Unsalted Butter” by The Long Winters and “Evil” by Interpol and a few others. They all sounded like soundtracks for unfamiliar cities, vaguely threatening or uncanny, with a similar kind of melodic structure. Angular, almost modal. Clean, reverbed guitars. Spacey, vintage organs. Drum hits on the 2 and the 3-and. Counterpoint rather than chords in the backing instruments. Minimal arrangements without shows of technical virtuosity – I mean, no noodling guitar solos, just riffs – yet climactic moments and a sense of dynamics, with quiet parts and loud parts.
Anyway, I keep finding new examples of this genre that no one else seems to have identified, and I’ve written one or two songs in the same mode. (Though I don’t think my voice is nearly drama-club enough for the urban wyrd, at least not at this stage in my life.)
The uncanny approach fit the subject matter: the machines reading us to sleep, recombining all their stolen words into shapes that train our brains to relax and our conscious minds to switch off.
I do not think AIs will be literally scraping our dreams for content in the near future, but more metaphorically it feels like they already are. They hallucinate. They draw human hands with extra fingers, and landscapes filled with animal eyes. If they are reflections of us, they reflect the part of us that is active at the border between waking and sleep.
The song hit exactly where I wanted it to on that score: intimate, inhuman thoughts.
LYRICS:
Displays shift orange, night is falling.
We navigate by streetlights home.
Tucked in like children with devices.
Drink deep and let consciousness go.We were taught to sleep to the speech of machines.
Our dreams are content feeds.Prefab pirate queens assembled piecemeal
Don’t let the bed hallucinations bite.
1,001 nights recombined here.
Our LLMs watch over us tonight.
Watch over us tonight.We were taught to sleep to the speech of machines.
Our dreams are content feeds.We were taught to sleep to the speech of machines.
Our dreams are content feeds.
Content feeds.
Content feeds.