World's First AI-generated Christmas Song Is the Stuff of Nightmares

Many holiday songs have lyrics that blend into the background, cloaked in sleigh bells and Christmas jingle, indistinguishable one from another. But if nothing else, every carol sung'round the fire has been written by a human being -- until now. Researchers from the University of Toronto trained a recurrent neural network, a type of complex artificial intelligence (AI), to write a song inspired by an image of a Christmas tree. Give it a listen above, and see if it doesn't chill you more than a frosty winter's eve. In a paper under conference review, the authors explain how they taught the AI to compose tunes by feeding it 100 hours of online music.