AI lyric writer

Write one rough description of the song and generate. Do not polish the prompt; the first draft is only there to give you something to disagree with. Read it once and mark any line that is either surprisingly good or surprisingly close to right.

Then write the song by hand, using the draft as scaffolding. Keep the structure and the section lengths because those are tedious to invent, borrow the two or three marked lines, and write everything else yourself. This is faster than starting from nothing and it produces something a listener can tell was written by a person.

Voice lives in specific choices. Five moves protect it even when half the lines started as generated text.

• –Replace one general noun in every line with the actual thing: not a car but a 2004 Corolla, not a city but Leeds.
• –Cut one adjective from every line. Drafts are adjective-heavy and the strongest line is usually the plainest one.
• –Add a time, a place or a name. The chorus can stay general; the verses should not.
• –Keep one line that does not rhyme properly. Perfect rhyme throughout is the single clearest sign that a machine wrote it.
• –Write the hook yourself. Even if it is worse than the generated one, it will be the line the song is remembered by.

A generated line reads: "I'm standing in the rain tonight, thinking of the way it used to be." It rhymes, it scans, and it could belong to any song written this year. Three rewrites, each doing a different job of it.

• –Specific: "It's raining on the bins outside the flat we left."
• –Restrained: "It rained. I did not call you."
• –Concrete image with tension: "I sat in the car with the wipers on and let the engine run."

None of the rewrites rhyme. All three tell you something the original did not, which is the trade being made at this stage of a draft.

It cannot know what actually happened to you, so it fills the gap with the most typical version of the story. It cannot tell a joke that survives being heard once. It cannot judge which of its own lines is best, and it will happily produce four near-identical drafts if you reward fluency over meaning.

It also cannot hear the song. Line lengths that read fine can be unsingable, and stress patterns that look tidy on a page can fight the melody. That judgement arrives when you sing the lines, not when you read them.

Eight passes take about fifteen minutes and catch most of what makes AI-assisted lyrics sound assembled.

• –Read the whole song aloud, standing up, at roughly the tempo you intend
• –Check the hook appears at least twice in the same words
• –Cut repeated words that fall within four lines of each other
• –Check the tense is consistent unless the change is deliberate
• –Check the point of view does not drift between speakers
• –Say every name and place aloud to catch something invented
• –Check no line has drifted close to a song you know
• –Save the version you are happy with somewhere outside the browser