SINGAPORE — A national day song written by artificial intelligence (AI) may just become a reality in the not-so-distant future. 

Redditors were recently impressed and amused by a musical song written by an AI-powered application called GPT-3 about the "Singaporean rat race".

The song — complete with two verses, a chorus and a bridge — was posted to the discussion forum on Tuesday (Dec 6) by user "subzephyr" who had asked GPT-3 to produce a song on the topic.

GPT-3 stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 and is the third version of a language prediction model that utilises machine learning to create human-like text. 

GPT-3 can create anything that has a language structure including answering questions, writing essays, producing poetry, translating languages and even creating computer code.

The tool was created by OpenAI, a research business co-founded by tech mogul Elon Musk.

'THE RAT RACE IS REAL'

Writing the lyrics in a collective voice, GPT-3 started off by lamenting over Singapore's seemingly never-ending rat race. It added that Singaporeans are trying to get ahead but doing so gets "harder every day".

The chorus then emphasised that "the rat race is real" and is taking a toll on people's lives. It said that it is hard to know what the future holds with the Goods and Services Tax (GST) increase "on the horizon".

Verse two complained about the long hours one has to work "day and night" just to make ends meet. It also claimed that it is getting hard for Singaporeans to "keep up the fight" due to the continuously rising cost of living.

The bridge, however, carried a more hopeful tone, rallying people to keep striving for a better future and to "keep running in the Singaporean rat race" despite the challenges that come their way.

Redditors marvelled at the song lyrics, claiming that they were better than that of National Day songs from recent years.

User “Syumie” wrote: “Let this AI write the next (National Day) song, it’s awesome.”

“DrCalFun” commented: “(There) will come a time where the lyrics and song are composed by engineers from GovTech using OpenAI technology (and) sung by our robot ambassador, Singabot.”

Others gave their notes on how the song could be improved, such as by choosing words that rhyme and sprinkling the word “together” a number of times to emulate National Day songs of the past.

The song also reignited the perennial debate on whether such AI technology poses a threat to jobs that have traditionally been done by humans.

User “incrementality” remarked: “AI definitely poses risk for a lot of jobs. If you put two sample texts like these side by side, and if we can't confidently tell which one is written by AI and which by human, the human is going to be out of a job.”

“DrCalFun” shared similar sentiments: “Personally, I think jobs like copywriters, copy editors, translators, ghost writers, graphic designers, event planners, even coders would need to up their game…That seems rather unnerving.”

User “ArhKan” however thinks AI should be embraced: “I think it is more like AI is going to become a mandatory tool to use daily in the not-so-distant future. This type of tool will help us all be more productive, and for sure coders are going to have to learn how to leverage this type of tool to be more efficient.”