I made a GPT called “Atomic Songwriter” that helps write lyrics

A suite of AI-powered tools to inspire songwriters and break through creative blocks

AI (Claude 3 Opus) summary of this article:

I’ve been experimenting with using chatbots to write lyrics. However, I’ve found that AI-generated lyrics often come across as cheesy and uninspired. To address this issue, I created “Atomic Songwriter,” a custom GPT that focuses on generating words, phrases, images, and ideas to inspire human songwriters, rather than writing complete lyrics. This article explores the tools within Atomic Songwriter, the process behind it, and the potential future of AI in songwriting

As a songwriter and AI enthusiast, I’ve been frustrated with my early results in getting chatbots to write lyrics. What: you don’t think that’s the first thing I tried on ChatGPT? Lyrics are hard, folks! But I try: you can check out my stuff here on Spotify …

My artist profile on Spotify

Unfortunately, AI-generated lines tend to come across as cheesy, cringeworthy, and like of flowery 8th-grade poetry. Despite my best efforts to train GPTs to write in a style similar to modern indie, rock, or folk songwriters — with relatable, emotionally resonant lines that don’t feel too on-the-nose — I just couldn’t seem to get the AI to cooperate. And I tried a lot, from training a custom GPT with very specific instructions, to providing my own lyrics and asking a chatbot to fill in some lines. AI’s “muscle memory” to pull back to the same cheesy patterns is confounding.

It’s not surprising that an AI trained on the entire Internet might struggle to produce lyrics that don’t fall into stereotypical or bland patterns. The world wide web is filled with simplistic, flowery poetry that lacks subtlety, stereotypes towards a style, and tends to follow the same tonal themes. Plus, AI’s know how to read now, but they don’t necessarily have a good sense for how things sound (and if they, you know, “sound good”). Even advanced models like Claude 3 Opus and GPT-4 tend to generate lyrics that feel uninspired and formulaic: they might occasionally stumble upon a useful idea, but it feels more like an accident than inspiration.

Enter: Atomic Songwriter

ChatGPT - Atomic Songwriter

So, I created Atomic Songwriter, a custom GPT that focuses less on writing complete lyrics and more on generating words, phrases, and ideas to inspire human songwriters. The “atoms” are the words … get it!?

Jeff Tweedy’s (excellent) book, How to Write One Song. Image source

I was inspired by Jeff Tweedy’s book, “How to Write One Song,” where he shares techniques for finding inspirational words in various sources, I realized that while chatbots might not be able to write amazing lyrics, they could excel at quickly generating words and ideas to spark creativity.

The four tools in this GPT

🗺️ Word Map

Provide the AI with a source word, and it’ll create a table of related words in categories like Places, People, Before, After, Sounds like, and Random. These concise, one-syllable words serve as little nuggets of inspiration (mmmm, nuggets), inviting you to launch into a new word, phrase, or idea.

A first pass at “trust” gives a few stinkers — lawyer, vault,—but some potential turning points, e.g., “faith,” “doubt,” and “rely.”

🏞️ Inspired Image

Utilizing OpenAI’s DALL-E, the AI generates an image based on your prompt. I’ve trained the AI to favor subjects that people tend to write about in modern music, such as human interactions and emotions. It’s the least “refined” of the tools, but visual cues can often inspire verbal ones easily, and it’s kind of amazing to have a tool that can just spit out as many of them as you like.

This image is cheesy and overwrought, BUT from that term “trust,” we can see “bridge,” “hold,” and even something like “together into the valley”

✍️ Phrase Generator

Input a source word, and the AI will generate phrases based on it, similar to the word map. These phrases often have a spoken word vibe, like prepositional phrases or little “moments” that can spark new ideas, topics, and words for your songwriting.

The phrase generator on “trust.” Again, a few low points, but some intriguing ones too.

I gotta be honest: the above example surprised me. I thought I’d trained Atomic Songwriter onto a more stringent set of prompts and shorter words, which this response is definitely bending. But while there are some eye-roll-y ones in here — “Walk in a silent forest,” anyone?—there are some phrases with interesting phonetic and emotional quality, like “bridge and river,” “lost in assurance,” and the mysterious (but, dare I say, poetic) “lean on stone.” Early signs suggest that, at least for my songwriting process and style, this tool may be the most useful in the bunch.

🙄 Rhyming Dictionary

While it’s just a plain old rhyming dictionary, and I personally believe that slant rhymes and non-rhyming lyrics are often more interesting than perfect rhymes, it’s still a useful tool to have in a songwriting toolkit.

Typing towards “Creative Flow”

The primary goal of “Atomic Songwriter” is to help you enter that coveted creative flow state by presenting you with new words, phrases, and images. It’s like having a tireless brainstorming partner that never runs out of ideas. The best part? You never know where these little sparks of inspiration might lead you. I’ve been fine-tuning the GPT to make it even more consistent, pragmatic, and inspiring, so you can keep going back to the ol’ Word Well. (Actually, “Word Well” might be a better title for this GPT? 🤔)

Building the bot

When I first started developing “Atomic Songwriter,” I discovered that using the “Create” section of the GPT creator, which resembles a chatbot interface, yielded better results than trying to program the AI through the “Configure” area. It’s almost as if the AI was better at prompting itself than I was … which is something substantiated in other areas of the AI world. It was choosing different ways of explaining what I wanted the GPT to do (and it certainly formatted information differently than I do while writing).

The only downside was that the “Create” mode sometimes overwrote my configurations, so I had to save frequently and revert to previous versions when things went awry. It was an ironically old-school way of interacting with a computer, given the cuttin-edge tech we’re working with.

It’s just a step

As AI continues to evolve and improve, then honestly I think tools like Atomic Songwriter will become outdated or outclassed. The AI’s will eventually better at evoking more emotionally and phonetically resonant words. I think the seeds are there, though, with tools like Atomic Songwriter, and hopefully the principle will stand that AI should help creators rather than replace them. After all, there is something inspiring and challenging in the notion that only humans are particularly good at understanding what creative content humans might like. Perhaps we can always stay one step ahead of those AI’s in this department.

In the meantime, Atomic Songwriter has been a success if it helps anyone — even just me—break their writers block. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m excited to share it with fellow songwriters looking for new ways to find inspiration. As AI continues to advance, I hope that we can be proactive in finding ways to harness its capabilities to assist us as creators, without letting it diminish our own agency in the creative process.

Bonus: other custom GPTs I want to make

1. Imagine having a custom GPT that serves as your professional profile, allowing potential employers to ask tailored questions (according to their own needs and point of view) and get to know you better. It’s like a résumé — or even, an entire portfolio site—but a la carte!
2. Or consider an article standardizer GPT that takes your raw observations and crafts articles in a consistent order and format — perfect for when you’re writing a series or a column and want to maintain a cohesive style.
3. How about … an AI that tells you how to better prompt AI’s? I know “prompt engineering” is still a hot topic and (reasonable) area of focus, but it feels like we’re wasting time letting all of these humans try to interpret AI’s for us 😆. (Actually, it looks like this might exist already in a GPT)

👋 Full disclosure: I had an AI help me write this article. While all the ideas and content are my own, the AI* assisted me in structuring and editing the piece to improve readability and flow. Yeah, I’m cheapening the soon-to-be-lost art of the human written word, but this kind of thing saves me time and allows me to focus on the creative aspects of my work, so I’m all in.

*I ended up using a version from Claude 3 Opus instead of my usual trusty ChatGPT Plus, though they’re both good at editing text once you provide the raw content. I wrote another article using GPT-4 in this way.