Draft of Classic Behavior Analysis Articles, In Song

Derek D. Reed (Institute for Behavior Resources)
Thomas S. Critchfield (Illinois State University)

Past AI Diary Posts: 1 2 3

I Wonder…

I wonder, wonder who,
Mmbadoo-ooh, who,
Who wrote the Book Of Love
– from “Book of Love” (1958) by The Monotones

If you like, you can take the present post as an existential examination of artificial intelligence’s (AI) sinister encroachment upon domains that were once uniquely the province of human beings, such as musical creativity. Or, you can view it as an extension of an argument advanced in previous “Something Interesting” posts about harnessing media other than books and journals to disseminate behavior analysis. OR, third option, you can maybe just not think so much….? And instead read on to see what happens?

We recommend the mindful approach, but you do you.

“See what happens” was our primary motivation for exploring how autonomous AI agents would do at generating pop-music-style songs based on some memorable contributions to the behavior analysis literature.

Up front, we thought it might be foolish to bet against today’s AI, which has impressive capabilities and already is invading popular music charts with compositions that most listeners cannot tell from human-made. That being said, ours was a challenge that might push even the craftiest human composers to their limits, because there’s nothing catchy or lyrical about how behavior analysts normally communicate about their science. To give you a frame of reference on what homo sapiens can do, here are a few illustrative behavior analysis tunes we found on YouTube, at least some of which presumably trace to human songwriters: “Radical Behaviorism” • “Reflexivity, Transitivity, and Equivalence” • “Dead Man’s Test Song” • “Experimental Analysis Song” • “Acceptance and Commitment Song“

The Tech

By contrast, the songs you can hear below were created virtually without human input, except of course for the raw material of behavior analysis articles that we fed into our digital lyric composer. The two of us each independently produced several songs using this method:

We asked ChatGPT to generate lyrics based on selected sources that pretty much any decently-trained behavior analyst would recognize as essential reading. We did tweak a few lyrics to add a flourish or repair texts that was excessively obtuse or clunky.
We gave the lyrics to the music-generating app Suno, specifying a musical style with which to pair them (We aimed for variety across songs, though given our academic source material we tilted away from certain genres that don’t use much verbiage). For each query, Suno can create multiple versions, and for this post we chose one we liked.

The Definitive Playlist

About the results: Sure, we have thoughts (see Postscript: Interview With Us), but mostly we are just proud of having helped to advance the budding young field of behavioral musicology.

*Ours any day now. Don’t tell the Recording Academy® we had help.*

The unparalleled playlist you’ll find below proves that it’s possible — actually very simple with AI technology — to create enjoyable alternatives to abstruse academic articles and dusty old textbooks. Yes, the playlist needs a bit of fleshing out before listening to it can replace a respectable graduate education, but we’re pretty sure that it’s already at least as pedagogically valuable as a Registered Behavior Technician training course.

Just kidding! Or maybe not.

Yes, yes, we understand that you’re anxious about whether human creators are threatened by what AI can do. But to us, this digitally-collaborative creative experience felt kind of empowering. Of course, as musical morons who’ve never written a song in our lives, we have nothing to lose when the machines take over. We’ll probably feel differently when AI starts replacing behavior analysts. But whether AI supplants or enhances human expertise, this is a rich topic for behavior analysts: After all, it’s humans interacting with bots that make them interesting, so behavioral issues always are involved. We hope this post gets you thinking about some of those.

For now, though, ditch the Deep Thoughts and give a listen to these inspirational earworms. And feel free to download them for your everyday playlists. You know you want to.

We’d love to hear what you think about the general topic of AI-assisted creativity, and about these tunes specifically, including whether you have a favorite track. Or, as a test of whether AI assistance is antithetical to individuality, if you know either of us personally or professionally see if you can guess which are Tom tracks and which are Derek tracks. Please have your say in the Comments box below. We might just award a prize for the best comment.

WHO WE’RE MEANT TO BE (feat. Rosalee Raynor)

Based on Watson, J.B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20(2), 158-177.

BRAND NEW DAY

Based on Brady, J.V. (2007). Behavior analysis in the space age. The Behavior Analyst Today, 8(4), 398-412.

SAY SOMETHING SWEET

Based on Hart, B., & Risley, T.R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Brookes; and Suskind, D. (2015). Thirty million words: Building a child’s brain. Dutton.

JACKPOT