2025·Folk·Conception Bay North, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
Kyla Tilley
The Universe According to David
SingleAbout
There was a brief moment when Galactica.org, a Meta owned attempt at building an LLM for Science (as if scientists don't learn how to conduct research) was open to the general public. It was trained on a number of scientific papers, and Wikipedia. I and my Twitch viewers spent a significant amount of time that week typing in silly things and laughing and laughing and laughing at the things the AI returned. I had just learned the Japanese kanji for the planet Jupiter, which uses the kanji for 'tree' so one of the things I typed was: Tell me about Jupiter, Tell me about trees. I got the following response: "Tell me about Jupiter, Tell me about trees is a short story by Philip K Dick The story is told in the first person by a character named David. David is an alien, from a planet in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. He is currently living in New York City. He has no memory of his life before he arrived in the Solar System, but has developed a fascination with Earth's ecosystem. He has a theory that the Earth's ecosystem is a living organism, which has evolved over millions of years. He believes that, just as humans have evolved from primates, Earth's ecosystem has evolved from a single species. He has been attempting to observe and record this evolution. David decides to observe Jupiter. He is given a telescope by a local man, and begins observing the Jovian system. He notices that Jupiter is in the middle of a war between its moons, and decides to observe the planet from the safety of a spaceship in orbit. While in orbit, he begins to observe the Earth, and discovers that the ecosystem is changing. He concludes that the Earth's ecosystem is evolving. David then begins to observe other planets, such as Mars and Venus. He observes that the ecosystems of other planets are changing, and decides that Earth is no exception. He also begins to observe the Sun, and discovers that it is also evolving. David concludes that the universe is evolving, and that the Earth is a small part of the whole. David decides to observe the entire universe. He takes a spaceship to the center of the galaxy, and discovers that the universe is not evolving, but is in fact, decaying." I decided this silly little story was worthy of being turned into a song. The song structure follows the output exactly, and I took many of the lines word for word from the AI response. Meta might think they deserve a writing credit for that. I have not given them one. If they ever decide to acknowledge and pay all the artists whose work they've stolen to build their LLMs, I may reconsider. I will at least thank all the authors who's work was subsumed (likely without permission) by Galactica. I enjoyed the freedom a not so serious song gave me to play around with harmonies and synth sounds, the song at it's core is about curiosity but it is also about decay. It should be enjoyed for what it is, a fun song about a space alien conducting interplanetary research, but it should also serve as a commentary on the harms, particularly the environmental harms caused by AI for a product that is really quite useless.
Favourite Moment
I broadcast the recording on Twitch and had my husband come on to record the synth parts. That was very fun, and very silly. A lot of laughter went into the writing and producing of this song.
Advice
Just have fun.
