Your Own Song: Original
By Ellie Haberl; Illustrated by Stuart Sachs
The family’s smart speaker was like a member of the family, especially since she was in charge of recommending music.
Eliza wasn’t just a smart speaker, she was the source of dance parties in the kitchen, uplifting music to start the day, and a relaxing song at night. Kylie’s parents valued independence and programmed Eliza to listen for Kylie’s voice from the time she was very young. The speaker used baby Kylie’s cries and coos to determine if she liked a song. Little by little, an algorithm was built around Kylie’s preferences as Eliza started to “learn” to play songs that Kylie liked. One day, Eliza played one of Saylor’s songs. When Kylie showed that she loved Saylor by clapping and singing along, the speaker learned to play Saylor more frequently.
Kylie loved the famous singer so much, she began to take her fashion cues from her. Saylor had long blond hair and so Kylie dyed her hair blond, too! In fact, most of her friends didn’t even know that Kylie’s hair was a deep, dark brown, the color of hot chocolate, instead of bright, bleached blond. Kylie wanted to sing like Saylor too.
Kylie’s parents were incredibly unique and original artists. Her dad was famous for creating his own method for mixing paint right on the canvas, a technique that made his paintings look gloopy and three dimensional, like the painted waves would crash right out off the canvas. Kylie loved setting up her easel in the studio corner. She could watch her dad, while working in her own creative space to paint in a style that felt authentic to her.
One night, as Kylie and her dad were painting together, Kylie brought the family’s smart speaker into the art studio and asked Eliza to play a mix she knew her dad enjoyed. She whispered into the speaker, so her dad would be surprised, “Eliza, play the singers who have inspired Saylor June.” This was one of Kylie’s favorite playlists too, a series of artists Saylor listed as her key sources of inspiration. Eliza answered back in a chirpy voice, “Playing Saylor June inspiration. Enjoy.” A song by Andie, an artist who was popular in the 80’s, started to play through the speaker.
“Oh, I LOVE this song!” Kylie’s dad said as he held his paintbrush like a microphone and sang in a high screechy voice.
Kylie groaned, “Daaaaaad. C’mon! I love this song, too! I can’t even hear it over your terrible singing!” She took a piece of scratch paper, crumpled it into a ball and threw it at him.
“Listen up, pumpkin. You cannot silence me! I’ve loved this song longer than you’ve been alive. In fact, this song was playing the first time I went on a date with your mom!”
Kylie was surprised; she thought she had heard the story of how her parents met and 80s pop star Andie was never a part of the story. She was confused. “Wait, I thought you met online? What do you mean this song was playing?”
Kylie’s dad put down his paintbrush microphone and squirted a blob of paint onto his canvas. “Well, we met on this dating app called InTune that put people together based on their musical preferences. The app argued that musical preferences helped build an algorithm with a very high success rate at predicting compatibility.” He swirled blue paint alongside green, making a bright teal color that reminded Kylie of the ocean. He continued, “InTune said that we were a near perfect match and they labeled us with a category they called: ‘almost soul mates.’ When we finally met, we weren’t surprised to learn that we both loved the singer Andie, so we sat outside under the stars and listened to Andie for hours.”
Kylie swirled blue and green on her canvas too, pleased by her own version of teal. She smiled. “Dad. That’s nuts! You were set up by an algorithm just because of shared musical interest? You must have really loved Andie if that was the primary reason for compatibility! Seems pretty risky to me. I guess, you must have played Andie a lot when I was growing up?”
Her dad didn’t look up from the canvas but continued to swirl the paint together to make the wave-like shapes. “We did, especially when you were a baby. But we didn’t want to completely determine who you would become, so we let you start choosing your own music when you were old enough to talk. You were only two years old but you loved to sing and dance along as Eliza played songs for you. It’s strange, though, you mostly chose the recommendations from Eliza! And Eliza just kept on playing Saylor June’s music.”
Kylie froze in place. “Dad. This is bananas. Here I was thinking you were the coolest parents in the world because you let me pretty much listen to what I wanted from the time I was a baby, but it was you and mom that fixed all my algorithms before I was old enough to choose! You played Andie when I was little, and I bet the smart speaker heard me enjoying the music and started to recommend other singers like Andie! I bet that’s why Eliza began recommending songs by Saylor; she sounds so similar to Andie! And the rest is history. It was all decided before I was born!”
Her dad put down the paintbrush and turned to face Kylie. “Sweetheart, don’t feel bad! It wasn’t Eliza’s music algorithm that made you who you are. Not at all.” He laughed. “It was the algorithm that brought your parents together, and that made you who you are, or at least, partly who you are!. Don’t feel bad about it. We’re all impacted by our environment!” He looked out the window and saw Kylie’s mom pull up in the driveway. He dropped his paintbrush in the water. “Oh! I’ll be right back, I’m going to help your mom carry in those canvases!” He rushed outside.
Kylie wasn’t sure how she felt about this new realization. There was just no way to find the boundary between who she was, authentically, and who she had become because of the presence of artificial intelligence in her childhood. Her hair was blond like Saylor. She sang like Saylor. Did this happen because of an algorithm that picked the music her parents would like? How far back did the influence of artificial intelligence go? Was she really as unique as she thought she was or was her identity the result of the many different algorithms that had influenced her life?
She looked out of the window and watched as her dad greeted her mom in the driveway. She could tell they were laughing as they awkwardly tried to carry the huge stack of canvases inside.
Kylie smiled too. “Ah, well,” she thought, as she watched her parents help each other. “Maybe those algorithm wizards really know what they're doing." She started to hum a Saylor song as she splashed paint onto her canvas.
Word count: 1271
Developed by AI Ethics Project 2020. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Citation: Haberl, E. (2020). Your Own Song. V.1.0. Illustrated by S. Sachs. In B.Dalton and T. Yeh (Eds.), AI Stories Series. Available INSERT URL.
Acknowledgement: This work is supported by National Science Foundation Stem+C Award #1934151 to T. Yeh, S. Forsyth and B. Dalton, University of Colorado Boulder.
File name: Your Own Song V1.0 June 2020