@ian @cameron
Well, first, what even is a "songwriter" these days? I think a lot of people getting songwriting credits in pop music are not doing what I would call "songwriting". They're certainly not "writing songs". Nor are the people dead for decades who didn't even perform or write the two seconds of orchestral sting that gets sampled and credited on a modern pop song. So let's say we're talking about "wrting songs", not "songwriting".

One difference between a thesaurus or rhyming dictionary (which I think is essentially the same as a program that looks up rhymes) and ChatGPT is that the dictionaries are presenting a human with all the choices at the word level and the human still has to pick the words to use in the phrase they're constructing, where ChatGPT is constructing the whole phrase. Another difference is that someone was paid for the work of putting those words into those dictionaries, where the people who put the words in ChatGPT didn't even know they were contributing to it.

I wish I had a better art history background, because I suspect a lot of the discussion here has already been had in the context of Duchamp's readymades, or the career of Jeff Koons.

Anecdotally, around 17 years ago I wrote a text generator for my web site (https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/hbzpoetry/) which makes incoherent poems in the style of an angsty 12 year old. I did it by running a whole lot of poems written by angsty 12 year olds through a markov chain script. I didn't even write the script, to be honest; it's a perl implementation of the "travesty" algorithm I found somewhere. Can I claim to be the author of any of those poems? I certainly don't think so, even though it took a lot of tuning of the algorithm and the input corpus to get it to produce those poems. Is writing a ChatGPT prompt more or less creative than what I did?