He Wears a Green Coat (2025)
Genre: Celtic; folk (AI Collaboration)
This past summer (2025), I experimented with some of the AI music-making tools (ChatGPT and Suno.com) to create the song “The Hemlock and the Cross.” Last month’s blog was intended to demonstrate the ability and startling speed of current AI. AI agents are already capable of performing creative tasks like songwriting at a fraction of the time it takes a human to do the same thing.
For us, the artistic process demands a lifetime dedication to learning, skill-building, practice, invention and re-invention. For AIs, it is the blink of an eye. Displacement of human employment by more intelligent robots has only begun and will continue to accelerate as AIs get “smarter” and grow from General to Super Intelligence. The niche craft of songwriting is just one illustration of how this may play out.
This month’s release is another song for which I provided a prompt, edited the first draft of lyrics from ChatGPT, and did not write any of the music (Suno.com did). [Like “The Hemlock and the Cross,” the idea for this song came from the book The Silence of Animals by British political philosopher, John Gray. At one point in the book, a character uses the expression “wearing a green coat” to describe lying at rest in a cemetery. ]
I’ve reproduced my prompt for “He Wears a Green Coat” below as well as the first draft provided by ChatGPT. I would recommend listening to the song and following the lyrics below. You can easily tell how much of the final result is my editing and how much can be credited to the robot. As usual, some of the rhymes AI generated were bland and vague to the point of meaninglessness, but other turns of phrase were better than I could come up with on my own—at least on first draft. (In addition to editing the text, I wrote another verse, in which I recycled some of the lines from the AI-generated draft, changed and rearranged other lines, and eliminated the bridge.)
Here is our “conversation”:
Me: I would like to write lyrics to a song.
Absolutely, I'd be glad to help you write song lyrics! To get started, could you tell me a bit more about what you have in mind?
Me: I would like to write lyrics that trace one man's life from birth to death centered around all the idioms associated with the color green. For example, when people are just starting out in life or an occupation, they are referred to as "green." When they amass a stash of money, they could be said to be "rolling in the green." When they are jealous, they are said to be "green with envy." Finally, the expression "wearing a green coat" can refer to the fact that a man is buried in the earth at death. Please create lyrics for a song called "He Wears a Green Coat" that incorporates the examples I gave as well as any other idiomatic references to green you can think of. The structure of the verses could trace a man's life from the beginning to the end. But, you don't have to follow that design. You should arrange the lyrics in a way that seems most logical to you. The song should be in verse(s)/chorus form. It can have a bridge if that seems logical. The mood should be reflective. The genre should be folk. You should probably use the title line "he wears a green coat" in the chorus.
[The text below was generated in 25 seconds! I timed it.]
Here’s a folk-style song called “He Wears a Green Coat” that traces a man's life using idioms and symbolism associated with the color green. It’s structured with verses that follow the arc of life, a reflective chorus that anchors the theme, and a short bridge. The mood is nostalgic and gently poetic.
He Wears a Green Coat
Verse 1
He was born on a spring-soft morning,
Eyes wide open to the dew.
Green as grass, the world before him,
Every leaf a path brand new.
He chased the wind with empty pockets,
Dreams that danced like fireflies bold—
Not yet wise, but full of wonder,
Not yet rich, but rich in soul.
Chorus
He wears a green coat, woven slow,
From the seeds of all he’s sown.
From the envy and the earning,
From the youth he once had known.
It’s the color of beginnings,
And the color that he chose—
In the end, beneath the hillside,
He wears a green coat.
Verse 2
He took a job in the city towers,
Learning fast but still so raw.
Green behind the ears, they told him,
Still he held the world in awe.
Time rolled on and luck rolled with him,
And the paper stacks grew high.
Rolling in the green, they whispered—
But he kept a humble eye.
Chorus
He wears a green coat, woven slow,
From the seeds of all he’s sown.
From the envy and the earning,
From the youth he once had known.
It’s the color of ambition,
And the cost that progress shows—
In the end, beneath the hillside,
He wears a green coat.
Verse 3
He loved a girl with ivy laughter,
But watched her dance with someone new.
Green with envy, he stood silent,
Heartsick, but the world still moved.
Later years brought greener pastures,
Children climbing up his knee.
And the garden grew around him—
A quiet man, a shade-tree peace.
Bridge
Green light fading in the distance,
Meadow mist and lullabies...
He gave more than he ever bargained,
Left a whisper in the pines.
Chorus (final)
He wears a green coat, soft and worn,
From the days that shaped his form.
From the longing and the learning,
From the sun and from the storm.
It’s the color of returning,
To the earth where silence grows—
In the end, beneath the hillside,
He wears a green coat.
I typed my lyric corrections into Suno.com and asked for music in a Celtic vein. The second AI collaborator produced what you hear on this recording. I made some post-production editing choices (highlighted the instrumental break, toned down some of the effects that the AI employs by default, and eliminated the excessive reverb on silences between vocal lines). On some of the verses and one chorus, I added my own voice as backing vocals.
Right now the allure of “prompt-based” music creation is almost irresistible. It has further “democratized” the field of songwriting. You no longer need to know anything about music theory, lyric writing, playing an instrument or singing in order to write a song! It has rapidly progressed from the level of parlor trick to a technology that is changing the music-streaming industry. It’s been estimated that 28% of daily uploads to sites like Deezer or Spotify are now fully AI-generated.
That shouldn’t surprise us since social media companies have already kept us in thrall to the algorithms of our smart phones for years. Spotify promised to connect performer to audience directly by cutting out labels and facilitating self-promotion, but has only reaped enormous profit at the expense of the artist. That AI startups have introduced yet another new amusement to distract us while they rake in more profits is an old saw.
We are still in the stage of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) now, as tech companies are refining human-level cognitive abilities in machines, but they are also urgently competing to “grow” ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). ASI will produce machines that are smarter than human beings and possess all of the collective knowledge of every human on the planet! It will operate at speeds we can’t compete with, come up with solutions we may not be able to comprehend, and use problem-solving processes the creators of AI don’t even fully understand themselves. All of these breathtaking changes are expected to happen within the next decade! Let that sink in.
Having now educated myself more about AI, I’m alarmed about what Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) portends for our future, if in fact humanity as a species has a future at all. There may come a time when our infatuations with the technology yield to urgent panic. I hope not, but we have a track record of marching blindly into new technological changes.
I recommend several resources if you’re interested in a better understanding of AI. The first is an interview Jon Stewart did with Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather” of AI, called “AI: What Could Go Wrong?” in which Hinton explains how AI “thinks” and exactly how AI was trained to operate. It’s fascinating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrK3PsD3APk
For an overview of the alarming rise of Artificial Intelligence and how it differs from all other human technologies, you can seek out any of the various interviews with the historian Yuval Noah Harari. This one is just an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jl64f-821o
Finally, I recommend an important new book about the the topic of ASI called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudowsky and Nate Soares. It will scare the shit out of you.