AI has no exes

There's a line I'm very fond of, half as a joke: artificial intelligence has no exes. It has never waited for a message that didn't come. It has never deleted a photo only to go hunting for it in the bin. It has never pretended not to care on seeing someone at a café table with another man. And that's why, however much it does, it can't write my lyrics.

I say it as a joke, but I mean it seriously.

What it knows and what it doesn't

The tool I use to produce the music of PLANETA GAYFOLK knows a great many things. It has heard more love songs than I'll hear in my lifetime. It knows what a sad ballad sounds like, how a spite chorus is usually built, which chords make us melancholy. If I asked it for a lyric about a break-up, it would probably give me something competent. Rhymes, metaphors and all.

What it doesn't know is how it feels when the break-up is yours. And in a lyric, that shows more than you'd think.

A lyric written without having lived anything tends to drift towards the general. It talks about "pain", "broken heart", "tears". Big words that weigh nothing. A lyric written by someone who's been there tends to drift towards the specific, the silly detail only someone who was there would know: the mug still in your cupboard, the song you can't put on any more, the metro stop where you used to get off to go to his place. The specific is what makes someone else say "that happened to me too".

There's another, subtler difference. Anyone who's been through a break-up knows you don't feel just one thing. You feel several at once, and they contradict each other. You miss someone and you're glad he's gone. You wish him all the best and you'd quite like his new boyfriend to have bad breath. That mixture, so inelegant, is the truest thing about heartbreak. Machines tend to pick one emotion and stick with it, clean and tidy, like a greetings card. Life isn't that tidy, and my lyrics don't want to be either.

Exes as material

I write a lot about exes. It's one of the themes that keeps coming back in my songs, along with gay love, pride, self-esteem and everyday life. I don't do it out of spite. I do it because an ex is a brilliant character. You know what he's like, you know his quirks, you have opinions about him nobody asked for. And there's nearly always something ridiculous about how it ended, even if at the time it wasn't remotely funny.

Take a title like «No quiero otro novio cojín» (I don't want another cushion boyfriend). It needs no explanation: anyone who's ever gone out with someone recognises the type. The one who's there the way a cushion is there, soft, comfortable and not holding much up. For that image to occur to you, you have to have seen it up close, in your own life or your friends'. You can't ask a machine for that kind of observation. It's never had a cushion.

Humour needs a wound

There's another thing I think matters. My songs have humour, sometimes lots of it. And humour about heartbreak only works if there's a wound underneath. If there isn't, it's a joke with no laugh in it, the kind told at an office dinner to break the ice.

The fun of laughing at an ex lies in the fact that he mattered to you. That it hurt, and now you can look at it from a little further away. That's a distance you cover by living. It can't be faked with a prompt. The machine can imitate the mocking tone, but it doesn't know what it's mocking, and the listener can tell even if they can't explain why.

That's why I'm so clear about the division. I write the lyrics, always. I produce the music with artificial intelligence, which I direct: I decide, I discard, I choose among what it offers me. I'm not going to say the musical part doesn't matter, because it matters enormously, and sometimes the tool finds something I'd never have imagined. But the experience, the thing being told, comes from someone who has lived.

People sometimes ask whether I'm afraid AI will one day write lyrics just as good. I think about it. I don't rule it out entirely. Machines learn fast and I won't be the one to say "never". But I suspect that even if it learns to write them well, something the listener is looking for without knowing it will be missing: the certainty that behind that line there's someone who went through it. When you listen to a spite song, part of you wants to know someone suffered just like you and survived. If you know nobody suffered, the song is just scenery.

A contradiction

Now the awkward part, because I don't want to come across as a purist.

The music in my songs moves people too, and that part is produced by the machine. Some listeners are moved by the melody before the lyric. Sometimes without having understood the lyric at all. Does that mean emotion can arrive with no experience behind it? Maybe. I haven't worked it out. What I do know is that, in my case, the song always starts from something lived, and that gives everything else its direction.

The machine has no exes. I do, and some of them would even thank me if they knew how many songs I owe them. I'd rather they didn't find out.

The full lyrics of all my songs are at mikesaintlouis.com.