In a 2009 post about music-data modeling, I posed the reasonable human question "What Beatles album is 'Day Tripper' on?" and bemoaned the various ways in which all available music-data sources failed to effectively answer it.
My human answer was this:
As of today, ChatGPT's (GPT-3) answer was this:
That's pretty good. Of course, the Wikipedia page for the song has this information, and my original question was about structured data-querying, not summarization of pre-written human text.
The "Day Tripper" thing was also a deliberately simplified test-question, too, because when I tried to write that post using my actual question for testing the existential level of musical question-answering, the narration was unhelpfully complicated. That question was this:
"Who are all the producers who produced non-Big-Country albums that members of Big Country played on?"
I have never had the patience to assemble a decent human answer to that, but I'd still like to read one. So today I asked ChatGPT. Here's what it said:
Points awarded for clarifying that this is not an exhaustive list. Points deducted for failing to clarify that it is not a factual list, either. That is, it does involve or at any rate implicate some facts, but those facts mostly do not connect in the ways described here.
Alan Shacklock was an English producer who moved to Nashville. Big Country singer Stuart Adamson also moved to Nashville at one point, and formed a country duo called The Raphaels. Their one album came out in 2001, not 1993, and was called Supernatural, not The Raphaels. As best I can tell, Shacklock did not produce it, nor any other album named The Raphaels. Tony Butler was Big Country's bassist, but didn't play on Supernatural, and would be the less-good example to pick even if he had, since it was Stuart's band.
Robin Millar produced the Big Country album The Seer, so including him in this list via some other album is not really what I meant, but I didn't clarify that, so I'll allow it. Or I would allow it, except that Justin Currie (better known as the singer in fellow-Scots Del Amitri) has no solo album called Hope and Despair, nor indeed any solo album earlier than 2007, nor any solo album produced by Robin Millar or played on by Big Country drummer Mark Brzezicki, although with Mark I guess it's always possible he participated in disguise or by accident.
Iona is another Scottish band, so one can easily imagine that some connection exists, but Iona's albums are all self-produced by co-founder Dave Bainbridge, none of them are called Bare, none of them came out in 1995, and none of them feature Dave Fielding, who was in The Chameleons but not Big Country for any non-quantum sense of "briefly".
Westworld did release their debut album in 1987, but it wasn't self-titled, wasn't produced by Steve Brown, and probably didn't feature Brzezicki.
The Brian Eno line is the best one in this answer, since it describes an actual album with its actual year and artists, and one of its actual producers. Sadly, Stuart didn't play on it, which is the only reason it's supposed to be in this list, so giving it credit for not introducing ancillary errors is like praising a cook for making cauliflower gratin with only organic red grapes and fresh herring.
I admit that I did ask it for 10 more examples, and if you willingly eat red-grape herrings you can't really complain, so I won't explain all the errors in those. Except to note that Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits definitely did not "co-found" Big Country. I never regarded this question as unanswerable, and having it misanswered doesn't change my feelings. I've always assumed that answering it would be an eventual triumph of conscious data-modeling, not massive ML overtraining, and I think ChatGPT wants, if it "wants" anything, me to at least doubt that now.
Maybe? A little bit? The answers exist, spread out among our minds. Maybe brute-force retro-structuring can eventually extract them from chaos without requiring the chaos to be improved first. I guess ChatGPT wins while losing by the mere fact that it has learned to answer questions "well" enough that we keep asking it things even though the answers are bad. If we are eradicated by this wave of AI, it will certainly be our own fault.
But that was always going to be true. Our self-created dooms always have the same ingredient.
My human answer was this:
This is partially a trick question, of course, as "Day Tripper" was originally a non-album single, but it has been on several Beatles compilations over the years, including the red 1962-1966 best-of, and in the remastered 2009 catalog it lands on both the mono and stereo versions of Past Masters.
As of today, ChatGPT's (GPT-3) answer was this:
"Day Tripper" is a single released by The Beatles in 1965, along with the song "We Can Work It Out". Although it was not included on any of The Beatles' original studio albums, it was later released on several compilation albums, including the "1962-1966" (also known as the "Red Album") and "Past Masters" compilations.
That's pretty good. Of course, the Wikipedia page for the song has this information, and my original question was about structured data-querying, not summarization of pre-written human text.
The "Day Tripper" thing was also a deliberately simplified test-question, too, because when I tried to write that post using my actual question for testing the existential level of musical question-answering, the narration was unhelpfully complicated. That question was this:
"Who are all the producers who produced non-Big-Country albums that members of Big Country played on?"
I have never had the patience to assemble a decent human answer to that, but I'd still like to read one. So today I asked ChatGPT. Here's what it said:
Here are some producers who worked on non-Big Country albums that featured members of the band:
Alan Shacklock: Produced the album "The Raphaels" (1993), which featured Tony Butler on bass guitar.
Robin Millar: Produced the album "Hope and Despair" (1994) by Justin Currie, which featured Mark Brzezicki on drums.
Mike Thorne: Produced the album "Bare" (1995) by the band Iona, which featured Dave Fielding (who had briefly played guitar for Big Country) on guitar.
Steve Brown: Produced the album "Westworld" (1987) by the band Westworld, which featured Mark Brzezicki on drums.
Brian Eno: Produced the album "Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks" (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno, which featured Stuart Adamson on guitar.
Again, this is not an exhaustive list, but it includes some notable examples of producers who worked on albums that featured members of Big Country in a different musical context.
Points awarded for clarifying that this is not an exhaustive list. Points deducted for failing to clarify that it is not a factual list, either. That is, it does involve or at any rate implicate some facts, but those facts mostly do not connect in the ways described here.
Alan Shacklock was an English producer who moved to Nashville. Big Country singer Stuart Adamson also moved to Nashville at one point, and formed a country duo called The Raphaels. Their one album came out in 2001, not 1993, and was called Supernatural, not The Raphaels. As best I can tell, Shacklock did not produce it, nor any other album named The Raphaels. Tony Butler was Big Country's bassist, but didn't play on Supernatural, and would be the less-good example to pick even if he had, since it was Stuart's band.
Robin Millar produced the Big Country album The Seer, so including him in this list via some other album is not really what I meant, but I didn't clarify that, so I'll allow it. Or I would allow it, except that Justin Currie (better known as the singer in fellow-Scots Del Amitri) has no solo album called Hope and Despair, nor indeed any solo album earlier than 2007, nor any solo album produced by Robin Millar or played on by Big Country drummer Mark Brzezicki, although with Mark I guess it's always possible he participated in disguise or by accident.
Iona is another Scottish band, so one can easily imagine that some connection exists, but Iona's albums are all self-produced by co-founder Dave Bainbridge, none of them are called Bare, none of them came out in 1995, and none of them feature Dave Fielding, who was in The Chameleons but not Big Country for any non-quantum sense of "briefly".
Westworld did release their debut album in 1987, but it wasn't self-titled, wasn't produced by Steve Brown, and probably didn't feature Brzezicki.
The Brian Eno line is the best one in this answer, since it describes an actual album with its actual year and artists, and one of its actual producers. Sadly, Stuart didn't play on it, which is the only reason it's supposed to be in this list, so giving it credit for not introducing ancillary errors is like praising a cook for making cauliflower gratin with only organic red grapes and fresh herring.
I admit that I did ask it for 10 more examples, and if you willingly eat red-grape herrings you can't really complain, so I won't explain all the errors in those. Except to note that Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits definitely did not "co-found" Big Country. I never regarded this question as unanswerable, and having it misanswered doesn't change my feelings. I've always assumed that answering it would be an eventual triumph of conscious data-modeling, not massive ML overtraining, and I think ChatGPT wants, if it "wants" anything, me to at least doubt that now.
Maybe? A little bit? The answers exist, spread out among our minds. Maybe brute-force retro-structuring can eventually extract them from chaos without requiring the chaos to be improved first. I guess ChatGPT wins while losing by the mere fact that it has learned to answer questions "well" enough that we keep asking it things even though the answers are bad. If we are eradicated by this wave of AI, it will certainly be our own fault.
But that was always going to be true. Our self-created dooms always have the same ingredient.