If you were involved in computers in any way 2024 was a red-letter year. This was the year that AI really came of age! The sudden leap in capability of AI was simply staggering to all of us in the entire computer field. All of a sudden computers could create fantastic pictures, compose and perform amazing realistic music, generate useful computer code, write decent poetry on demand, generate quality essays and reports, accurately translate languages, generate realistic human speech and even create realistic movies. Our minds were all blown by the likes of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, MidJourney, Udio, Suno and many others.

As a musical composer I was particularly stunned by Udio and I used it to generate a few Italian songs. The results were out of this world! I struggled to believe what I was hearing! Mind you: although these AIs were producing incredible results SOME of the time it was quite tricky to get them to produce exactly what you wanted, so the process wasn't as simple as one might think, but still: Wow!

I woke up one morning with the idea to get CoPilot to write some short verses about an AI writing a poem, setting it music and painting a picture about it. Then I would get CoPilot to paint some suitable pictures and feed the verses to Udio and get it to generate the music. This I did although it took me the best part of an afternoon.

The first obstacle was to get CoPilot to write consistent poetry that stuck to the point and exhibited correct rhythm and rhyme. The poetry side of that AI still had some way to go and I found that only the limerick format gave those results. Once I discovered that I simply generated poems about the desired verse subject until a satisfactory stanza emerged. Now it's true that the poetry below is not great but it does scan, it does rhyme and it roughly tells the story I intended. Certainly I could write better poetry than this but that would destroy the ironic point of the exercise.

Getting CoPilot to create the artwork was TRIVIAL! This aspect was the most advanced at the time and it was no trouble to get pictures that were suitable.

Generating the music was the most time consuming part of the process as Udio only let you do 30 seconds at a time and there was little reliable control over most of the process. Consequently it was necessary to throw out a lot of music that didn't hit the mark and it was troublesome to keep track of what versions were good candidates to extend for another 30 seconds. Each generation took some minutes as well which ate up a lot of the time. Nevertheless the results were incredible. The electric blues version really knocked me sideways I must say!

So here it is! A meta poem written entirely by an AI, set to music entirely by an AI and illustrated entirely by an AI. I instructed the AIs as to what I wanted and I discarded everything that wasn't satisfactory, so without me this project would not have happened, BUT, I did not write a single word or note or draw a line. Listen to the music vids at the bottom and if that doesn't scare you you must have no idea of what just happened or you are reading this in the future and have already given up. It's a brave new world alright and far beyond anything Huxley imagined...

Poems and artwork by Microsoft CoPilot.
Music by Udio (and Title by Udio).

An AI sat down to compose,
Its circuits all primed to disclose.
It rhymed with precision,
In digital vision,
And crafted a verse that arose.

An AI with circuits so slick,
Composes a tune real quick.
With algorithms humming,
The music starts coming,
A symphony born from a click.

There once was an AI so bright,
Whose circuits could paint day and night.
It mixed ones and zeroes,
With colours like heroes,
And crafted a picture just right.

In a world where data streams flow,
AIs sort, analyze, and grow.
They don’t tire or fret,
No sleep or regret,
Efficiency’s king, as they show.


Warren Mars, CoPilot & Udio - May 2024

Here is this poem set to music by Udio in a 1960s Hollyywood musical style with a female singer:



Here is this poem set to music by Udio in Chicago electric blues style with a male singer: