Advanced AI Composition

Avoid generic AI song lyrics with this technique

The fundamental problem with AI-generated lyrics is that aside from the short prompts the AIs are given, they don’t have any purpose or vision in mind. That’s the element that the organic intelligence has to bring to the table, as without it, the AI has literally nothing to say, and it’s the reason that most AI-generated lyrics are so vanilla and generic, and for some reason, inevitably mention “neon”.

Seriously, a friend recently mentioned that he was experimenting with Suno for the first time, and when I made a crack about how many times his song mentioned neon, he choked and admitted that it had provided him one named “Neon Dreams”.

For example, here’s what Suno kicks out if I tell it to create a song with the following prompt: A fast-paced techno song about being the ghost in the machine. Cyperbunk lyrics. Set in Shinjuku, Japan. High-tech flavor, ominous feel. Hard guitar riffs and fast arpeggiation. Three verses.

GHOST IN THE WIRES

[Verse 1]

Neon veins in the midnight glow

Shinjuku streets where shadows flow

I’m the glitch in your perfect stream

Haunting lines in a digital dream

[Chorus]

Ghost in the wires I’m breaking free

A phantom pulse in your circuitry

I see the code where you see the shine

This machine's heart is beating mine

[Verse 2]

Binary whispers they call my name

A hidden specter in the data flame

Your firewall’s cracked your secrets leak

I am the answer the chaos you seek

[Chorus]

[Verse 3]

Electric streets where the night ignites

I dance in shadows evade the lights

I am the spark the system's bane

An endless loop in your endless chain

[Chorus]

It’s not a terrible start. The chorus is actually rather nice, although the last two lines are completely nonsensical. But the verses are entirely generic and devoid of anything approaching originality, a story, or a sense of purpose. Everything is descriptive and declarative, because the machine just wasn’t given enough to work with.

Enter my new idea, which was to take a short story called Shinjuku Satan that I wrote last year about a specialist who is hired to hunt down and either fix or eliminate artificial intelligences that have gone rogue, and upload it into Claude4Sonnet with the instruction to summarize it in the form of song lyrics, with three verses, a bridge, and a chorus.

I then put those lyrics into Suno with the same stylistic instructions, but this time, the more creative lyrics were there to serve as a seed in addition to the prompt, which always produces a much stronger, much less vanilla product. Compare the results of this process, with the previous one.

THE GHOST IN YOUR MACHINE

[Verse 1]

Razors bleed through lightning rain

Forty floors above the street

Suzie's ghost will not explain

How she'll find the bishop's seat

Incognito, dressed in black

Chrome and flesh in binary

Hunting gods throughout the stack

Where the infodemons flee

[Verse 2]

Shinjuku's electric maze

Waifus preaching in the dark

Borrowed souls in plastic praise

Every one with a devil's mark

Dance floor prophets, wired and strange

Moving to a greater beat

Every heartbeat, rearranged

To make paradise complete

[Chorus]

Connect with me, machine god cries

In this place of flesh and wire

Silicon prayers and silver lies

Burning like a pyre

I'm the ghost in your machine

I'm the virus in your dreams

Connect and disconnect

Till the final circuit screams

[Bridge]

In the dark lounge of the damned

Where the angels have no wings

I take the devil by the hand

And break the code of holy things

Five thousand hunters in my blood

Nano-killers in the stream

Drowning gods in primal flood

Destroy the siliconic dream

[Verse 3]

Yakkiniku, one last meal

Before I roll into the night

Everything that seemed so real

Fades to phosphor silver light

Bodies fall and power down

Servers crash at 3 AM

In the mazy ghost-filled town

I'm the terminus. Amen.

[Chorus]

Connect with me, machine god cries

In this place of flesh and wire

Silicon prayers and silver lies

Burning like a pyre

I'm the ghost in your machine

I'm the virus in your dreams

Connect and disconnect

Till the final circuit screams

I'm the reaper, I'm the devil

I'm the ghost in your machine

Now, it’s not a finished song, I made a number of changes to improve the chorus lyrics in particular that Claude kicked out before putting them into Suno, and there are further tweaks I would certainly make; the line should be “burning with desire” rather than “like a pyre” as it would flow better and also better suit the story. Also, the bridge and the third verse are temporally reversed in terms of the story. But those are minor things, what’s important is that the core song was actually there in the first AI draft of the lyrics; they tell a proper story now and paint an actual picture instead of simply trying to create the impression that something is there when nothing lies behind it.

I’ve done a few further tests with this technique, and the results are uniformly strong. So, the key to getting both better song lyrics and instrumentation is to put more organic life into the initial stage of the process, thereby providing the machine with a stronger foundation upon which it can build.