A love letter written by an AI text generator built at the University of Southampton, and set to music, has been released for Valentine's Day.
The love song is called Delirious Ecstasy and features the line 'There is the answer of my life, And you're my biohazard baby!'. You can stream it on Spotify and other channels from today.
It is one of seven unique and quirky songs created by University of Southampton academics in Music, English and Computer Science. The collection is called Love Letters and will be released in full in April as part of a new album, Too Many Sweets, by Dr Benjamin Oliver, Associate Professor in Composition.
Project leader Dr Oliver wrote the music. He worked with Will May, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature, to build a large body of quotations from thousands of love poems and lyrics to enter into a text generator, called LovelaceGPT. It was built by student researcher Yaseen Mohammed Osman, mentored by Lecturer in Computer Science Dr Shoaib Jameel.
Dr Oliver said: "Creating Love Letters was super fun. The words generated by LovelaceGPT are often strange but also wonderful and evocative. I found it quite liberating to develop creative texts using a text generator because you don't owe the machine anything and it doesn't care if you undertake brutal edits. It will also just keep making stuff, even if it's gibberish!
"But I'll also admit there's something a little sad about relying on technology to write something that should be so personal and heartfelt – so I'm not sure LovelaceGPT should be let loose on writing Valentine's cards anytime soon!"
The full collection of Love Letters has been recorded by singer and University of Southampton vocal coach Hannah Williams, from Winchester, along with a quartet of keyboardists and percussionists from London-based contemporary classical music group Riot Ensemble.
The recordings feature on Benjamin Oliver's portrait album, Too Many Sweets, which will be released by Birmingham Record Company, distributed by NMC, in April 2024.
