Bowie By Robot: The songs of David Bowie written about by AI chatbots

The illustrations by Kev F appear elsewhere on Bowie's internet as part of a colouring book.

David Bowie was more than just a pop and rock music pioneer, you know. He was more than just an artist. He was more than just an actor. David Bowie was a visionary.

Who can forget, way back in 1999 in a BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman, what Bowie had to say about the internet?

"The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable," he said. "It's an alien life form. Is there life on Mars? Yes, it's just landed here.

"The actual context and state of content is going to be so different to anything we envisage at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it's going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about. It's happening in every form. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about."

On the subject of music, back in the earliest days of downloading and streaming in 2002, Bowie told the New York Times ""Music is going to become like running water or electricity,"

"I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years," he said, "because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen.

In so many ways, not just by his literal predictions, but through his musical innovations and his explorations in fashion, Bowie described the future in many uncanny ways.

So what, we wonder, would Bowie have made of Artificial Intelligence?

He didn't spell out, in so many words, that he would like, by the middle 2020s, for a selection of AI chatbots to have a go at writing articles about a whole load of his most famous songs. But we like to think it's what he would have wanted, so that's what we've done.

For the text of these articles, we asked a selection of AI systems to do the writing. Prompted by either the song titles, lyrics from the songs, or words associated with them, we used the free online version of some AI chatbots (who shall remain nameless to avoid plugging, embarrassment, and any unfairness to them since our prompts might not have been as constructive as they might have been) to come up with what they could.

We then got a proper human to fact-check these articles and give corrections whenever, as occasionally happened, the robots strayed from the truth.

We couldn't however, manage to stop them using the word 'iconic'. Man, those chatbots love that word.

In this book you will learn how Bing Crosby and David Bowie had been recording together since the 1950s, and how Bing added backing vocals to Bowie's single Heroes. You will learn how Space Oddity was written and recorded in 1979 by rising star Yeon Soo Min. And you will learn how it's not easy being a modern love Monk.

Prepare yourself for flights of fantasy and imagination that, in all honesty, could only have come from the brain of a robot. Will you end up loving the alien? We do hope so.

kevfcomicartist.com