SatiricAI investigates the potential of Generative AI for commentary and resistance by drawing upon the historical praxis of the satirical song, in response to SingAiBore’s exploration of propaganda production of patriotic songs by AI. Instead of getting AI models to learn from previous propaganda and getting them to generate new versions (in SingAiBore), Stephen prompts LLM (Large Language Model) to generate sets of lyrics about a person / party / city to extract grievances embedded in the model, these are then edited and compiled for clarity into a satirical song which is then fed back to the LLM to suggest a musical style for the song. The satirical song and suggested musical style is then fed into an AI song generator. The diversity of the resulting songs were refreshing (as opposed to the same-ness of patriotic songs) – while one may gripe about their musical merits, despots do get the best biting lines.
AI songs typically have to be generated multiple times until a version is generated that is deemed satisfactory/good, however Stephen only takes and presents the initially generated song pair (warts and all) in order to assess the democratizing potential of AI generated political satire (i.e. keeping everything within the “free” tier of these models, as voices of resistance typically do not have the resources to spend on multitudes of generations to find the “perfect” one).
Stephen’s personal favorite is the Queen Punk which took the most generations and edits as having “Queen” in the prompt biases the model to return trite tokens. Stephen continued to refine the AI prompts and lyrics to be sung from the perspective of the exploited colonies, until it came up with “Ding Dong the Bitch is Dead” expressing her unspoken misdeeds in punk grievance as a counter to the performative expectations of grief at her passing. While fixing the ending lyrics, Stephen was inspired by the previous verses to write an appropriate punk ending that simultaneously alludes to her bland character, her Gemanic lineage and her sour grapes handling of colonies’ Independence which led to bloody confrontations to this day (e.g. Africa, India/Pakistan, Malay/Thai borders).
Her Empire’s gone without a doubt,
Ding Dong, the Bitch is Dead
that bitch is just a sour kraut / Sauerkraut
