Just because I can’t sing doesn’t mean I won’t. I’m a sucker for a microphone and a karaoke machine. I’m sure I’ve made more than one person cringe with my off-tune crooning, but nothing can compare to what I just heard from the lab at the University of Toronto. Researchers Raquel Urtasun, an associate professor in computer science and Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision, and Sanja Fidler, an assistant professor in computer science, along with PhD student Hang Chu, have trained recurrent neural networks to take a digital photo and turn it into a computer-generated singalong. The trio have dubbed it “neural karaoke.”
According to The Guardian article that alerted me to this truly horrible Christmas song created by artificial intelligence (AI), “We are used to thinking about AI for robotics and things like that. The question now is what can AI do for us?” says Urtasun. “You can imagine having an AI channel on Pandora or Spotify that generates music, or takes people’s pictures and sings about them,” adds Fidler. “It’s about what can deep learning do these days to make life more fun?”
While their intentions are good, I’m not sure this song makes life more fun. You be the judge: