Building a lyric search engine

Y'all probably know that my views on AI are somewhat nuanced. I’m not 100% “AI BAD!!!” but I’m also hesitant to rely on AI for a lot of things, and generally do not care for generative AI or any situation where you need AI to “reason” on things.

But, recently I’ve wanted to remember the name of a song that I listened to a lot, and where the lyrics I can remember don’t come up in any of the major lyrics databases. I listen to a lot of obscure indie music that tends to get lost by the major platforms, and I’ve been packratting music for decades now.

Further, it’s only fairly recently that music started to get lyrics embedded into the id3 tags (thanks to bandcamp really pushing for that) and even the streaming platforms have taken forever to pick it up. So a lot of the music I listen to has never had its lyrics entered in any sort of machine-searchable way.

But, hey, there are plenty of AI models for vocal extraction and text transcription… so why not actually use them?

Read more…

on GPT-3, and my discontinuation of its use

I just learned that OpenAI, the company behind GPT-3, is founded and funded by Elon Musk. I mostly feel foolish for having not looked into the company at all, especially given that this isn’t exactly a hidden fact or anything. Very much my bad for not doing even the remote bit of due diligence when it comes to a piece of tech that seems to be completely changing how people think about… well, everything.

I’ve mostly been using it for shitposts, but I’ve also been playing with it for iterating on song lyrics. All that now feels tainted.

I have taken down my GPT-3 posts from this site, and I will be discontinuing my use of it going forward. The one song I’ve finished that had any GPT-3 involvement will stay in my catalogue (as it’s a somewhat personal song to me and GPT-3 only helped with a couple of lines in the end) but as interested as I was in experimenting with new tech (knowing fully well the ethical concerns with how its training set was generated) this has brought into perspective how I was participating in something I don’t want to encourage.

I apologize for playing any part in normalizing this.