ChatGPT Lyrics

My first attempt to use ChatGPT to generate lyrics for an existing musical idea with the working title of Beyond the Station.

My typical way of working is to consult a list of titles and my lyric notebook and to map words over the melody and chord changes. In this case, the music comes first.

The seed idea:

The generated lyrics, with usable lines highlighted:

Verse 1
Way beyond the station, I'm traveling
Through an unknown land, my dream unraveling
Oh I'm venturing through a new found love,
Toward an unknown destiny from far above

Chorus
I've been looking for a new home
Where I can find a place to call my own
I'm ready to take on this journey now
Just feeling the power and I'm way beyond the station

Verse 2
Floating through the sky, searching for that feeling
Like I'm soaring to the stars with no ceiling
I'm seeking and trying to find my place in the sun
For I know this is the way for my journey to come

Chorus
I've been looking for a new home
Where I can find a place to call my own
I'm ready to take on this journey now
Just feeling the power and I'm way beyond

It generated a few lines that I could use, but my experience so far is that it returns generic results that have to be manually shaped. If you start with a musical idea, that will define how the words get mapped, and most of the generated words are chaff.

I didn't find the ChatGPT (ChaffGPT) lyrics very musical. Again, you could use words or lines but that's something I already know how to do. Bowie's lyric generator from the mid-90s is still far more interesting. What you want is abstraction, and that is exactly what you have to do with the generated lyric: pull meaning from it.

Art is much more than mere generation. If you've ever had ideas, that's the main generator. Everything else is a matter of hewing.