This AI Wrote A Christmas Song, And It'll Give You Goosebumps

Artificial intelligence is growing by leaps and bounds, but it won't be replacing humans any time soon, at least if a newly penned-by-AI Christmas jingle is anything to go by. The song starts out like any Christmas jingle, and you may even find yourself tapping your foot along...until the lyrics register and you wonder what kind of dystopian Christmas wonderland you've stumbled upon.

The new jingle — which has been set to music and is sung by a computer itself — was recently released by the University of Toronto. The work was performed by the university's associate and assistant professors of computer science Raquel Urtasun and Sanja Fidler, as well as graduate student Hang Chu.

The team trained the artificial intelligence — called recurrent neural networks — to create a "singalong and dance-along" based on a digital image of Christmas-related things. You can listen to the song it generated and sang based on the included image via the video above. The university calls this a 'neural karaoke.'

This isn't the first time a team of researchers have taught an AI to create its own written artwork. In the recent past, researchers fed an AI a bunch of written romance novels and then had it create its own romance stories based on what it learned. The result, oddly enough, was actually pretty dark and depressing.

SOURCE: University of Toronto