Challenged By Friends To Make Christmas Songs, Steven Wilson Releases December Skies With AI Assistance

Steven Wilson (Instagram @stevenwilsonhq)

JAKARTA - Steven Wilson shared a surprise Christmas single titled December Skies after being challenged by a friend.

The Porcupine Tree frontman uploaded the song on December 14, where he shared a story about the amazingly lively song.

On YouTube, Wilson shared that he was 'challenged by a friend last week about why I never performed a Christmas song.'

"I protested that it wasn't me, and besides that I don't think I have the desire to write the right Christmas lyrics," said Wilson.

His friend then suggested that Wilson use the GPT Chat to write the song, where later the artificial intelligence will produce Christmas lyrics in Wilson style.

The GPT chat is an AI chatbot in the form of a generative language model that uses transformer technology to predict the probability of sentences or next words in a conversation or text command

"I was surprised to see how fast and easy it was to guide this (Chat GPT)," said Wilson. He also revealed some further clues they gave to perfect the song: 'don't call Christmas' and'make it feel cold and lonely'.

The musician also shared that he wasn't entirely sure about what he thought about AI after using it to make December Skies.

"The spontaneous reaction is to consider this a threat to musicians like me," Wilson said.

"But this is clearly not going away, so it's my experiment to try to accept it and use it as a tool in the creative process. And of course it's also for fun doing something I usually never think of, a typical seasonal song," he continued.

"I want to know what people think about this. I want to know what my opinion is about this."

Wilson also revealed that the December Skies video was also made with the help of the AI system by Miles Skarin, based on images taken from several previous Wilson videos then placed into 2D and 3D backgrounds.