A Japanese artist will use a song partly composed by AI to welcome Pope Francis, who recently shared his concerns about the technology.

The song, “Protect all Life – The Signs of the Times,” is written by Jun Inoue.

Inoue is a Catholic himself and created an AI program which can generate a song in just a few seconds.

“I thought I should give everything I had to the song, so I decided to put in all the cutting-edge technology I had,” Inoue told Reuters.

Inoue wasn’t sure about using AI but decided to do so because of how intertwined the history of technology and music is. However, last month, AI News reported on Pope Francis’s concerns about artificial intelligence.

Pope Francis shared his views on AI during a Vatican conference attended by theologians, academics, and tech executives such as Mozilla co-founder Mitchell Baker and Facebook’s director of cybersecurity law Gavin Corn.

“If mankind’s so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to an unfortunate regression to a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest,” Pope Francis warned.

The Vatican hopes the conference will lead to a future document on considerations to make when developing AI technologies.

Inoue’s song is unlikely to trigger much concern from the Pope and may even help to show how AI can have a positive impact on people’s lives if used responsibly.

Earlier this year, a firm called Canny AI used deepfakes of politicians to create the following music video for John Lennon’s track Imagine:

This is, as the creators’ intended, an example of AI’s dangers when it comes to convincingly manipulating content.

Politicians and other influential figures could be made to appear like they’re saying and doing things which they’re not.

Such means could be used to sway public opinion and influence elections, and it’s going to be very difficult teaching the public not to necessarily believe their eyes and what to look out for when it comes to fake content.

Pope Francis will visit Japan from Nov 23rd-26th and marks only the second papal visit to the country.

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Users can input their own melody and the AI will create a harmony in the Baroque style of Bach.

“Bach was a humble man who attributed his success to divine inspiration and a strict work ethic,” wrote Google in a post. “He lived to see only a handful of his works published, but more than 1,000 that survived in manuscript form are now published and performed all over the world.”

Aside from being a fun way of passing time, the doodle also intends to educate users on some basic fundamentals about how machine learning works.

Google’s model for its first AI-powered doodle was trained on 330 of Bach’s compositions. It was developed by Anna Huang from Google Magenta, in partnership with the Google PAIR (People + AI Research) team which provided TensorFlow expertise to allow the experience to run in just a browser.

Huang built Coconet, the model which powers this AI doodle that can harmonise melodies or compose them from scratch.

In a technical post explaining how Coconet works, the Magenta team wrote:

“Coconet is trained to restore Bach’s music from fragments: we take a piece from Bach, randomly erase some notes, and ask the model to guess the missing notes from context.

The result is a versatile model of counterpoint that accepts arbitrarily incomplete scores as input and works out complete scores.

This setup covers a wide range of musical tasks, such as harmonizing melodies, creating smooth transitions, rewriting and elaborating existing music, and composing from scratch.”

The doodle is available on Google’s homepage between Bach’s birthday (March 21st) to the 22nd.

Creating AIs is difficult, though arguably easier than putting 334 candles on a birthday cake to honour the man himself. Well (classically-)played, Google.

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