For my AI prompt, I asked AI to write song lyrics in the style of Gregory Alan Isakov. The image below contains the lyrics of an actual Gregory Alan Isakov song, “All Shades of Blue” for reference:

I prompted Claude AI to do the following: “Write a song in the style of Gregory Alan Isakov.” Below is Claude’s attempt:

It gets themes correct. These themes are present in various Gregory Alan Isakov songs. In essence, the style is correct. However, the way the AI puts these themes together feels, to me, lifeless. Also, it went a little overboard on the imagery of nature. The AI is trying to capture Gregory Alan Isakov’s profound ability to use clever, folksy abstractions that somehow connect to common human experience, but it falls short in small ways. I also did tests with Gemini and ChatGPT. All of these models have a general idea of the style of Gregory Alan Isakov. That being said, I believe creativity relies on novelty and value. Surprising is too much of a stretch. The world is mostly built on tiny increments of innovation. Therefore, I believe this to be creative output. None of these lyrics are copied from actual songs. The AI model knows the general style of Gregory Alan Isakov, and it is writing an original song from its general idea of what Gregory Alan Isakov could sound like. The song is new. While the song may not have much value to me, I believe the writing is technically and thematically strong to the point of possibly being valuable to others.