This was Music Ally’s April Fool news story for 2023, so we inserted this note once we reached the afternoon, and the end of foolishness time. Enjoy! And read our separate feature on getting ChatGPT to write us some other spoof stories…
Ed Sheeran trolled music critics last month with his opinion that nobody needs reviews any more. Now he’s set to anger fellow musicians with the release of his new album ‘-‘ while sparking a guessing game among fans.
Why? In his latest interview, Sheeran revealed that he’s been using a creative AI for the album.
“At least one of the tracks was written entirely by the AI,” Sheeran told Swedish radio station Looflirpa FM, while declining to say which.
“I want to leave people guessing! We trained it on my entire back catalogue just to see what it came out with. Most of it was terrible, but this one song was amazing, so I recorded it.”
Sheeran isn’t the first artist to train an AI on his own music for creative purposes: Holly Herndon and Yacht have explored the same idea.
Sheeran admitted in the interview that the AI-written track was heavily inspired by his previous hits: “Perhaps too much, but they were popular, so it’s obviously got a good pair of ears. Or whatever AIs have instead of ears!”
The album comes out on 5 May, with confirmed tracks so far including ‘Eyes Closed’, ‘End of Youth’, ‘Salt Water’ and ‘Castle on the Galway Shape of Happier Perfect Shivers Out Loud’.
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