In the future we will all have songs written about us, and it will be Lance's fault.
Computational Complexity 2024-07-29
In response to my blog post about how its easier to FIND novelty songs (and other things) than it used to be (see here) Lance showed how easy it is to CREATE a novelty song using AI. He had an AI write lyrics and music for THE BILL, see here.
The song is pretty good and pretty accurate (except that I don't drink coffee or burn toast and I would not say that in math I'm quite the star), but this post is NOT about the song.
There have been songs about
The Mandelbrot set (see here),
Lobachevsky (see here),
Gauss's Law (see here),
Galois (see here),
The Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem (see here),
William Rowan Hamilton (see here),
and I will end this list with the Newton-Leibniz Rap (see here).
(I am sure there are more songs about famous mathematicians. If you know any that are better than the BW Rap, that is, any of them, please leave a comment.)
Side note: There are poems about Fermat's last theorem, as discussed in my post here.
So what do Mandelbrot, Lobachevsky, Gauss, Galois, Bolzano, Weierstrass, Hamilton, Newton, Leibniz, and Fermat have in common?
They are all famous and for a good reason- they all did math worth doing that is remembered many years later.
Bill Gasarch- not so much (unless the Muffin Problem is the key to solving world hunger).
In the past the EFFORT to write a song about someone was enough so that one would only bother for famous people.
With AI it is now EASY, as Lance did with his song THE BILL. He used ChatGPT for the lyrics and Suno for the song itself.
So what does this say about the future? It will be so easy to write songs about ANYBODY that it will be done. So having a song about you will no longer be a sign that you are famous or special. We are RIGHT NOW in a transition. If I tell my nephew that there is a song about me and that I have a Wikipedia page, he is impressed. My great niece- not so much.