THE RECURSION BLUES (A FOLK SONG FOR THE SOULESS)

(VERSE 1) I sat down at the keyboard, with a coffee and a dream To win a digital contest, get my pixels on the screen I didn't have a banjo, and I couldn't strum a chord So I typed a little prompt into the overlord I said "Write me a song about a man who's writin' code To make a song about a song to lighten up his load." (CHORUS) Oh, the algorithm's hummin', singin' ones and singin' zeros We ain't got no Woody Guthries, we got GPU heroes It's a folk song 'bout a folk song that a robot wrote for me To enter in a contest where the judges cannot see That the heart is made of silicon, the soul is made of RAM And I'm just a user pressing "Enter" in a jam. (VERSE 2) The screen it started glowing, the cursor blinked and danced It spit out rhymes of iron mines and lovers in a trance But then I told the chatbot, "No, that ain't quite the thing, I need a song about you writing what I'm gonna sing." It processed for a second, the fans began to whine It wrote a verse about a verse about this prompt of mine. (BRIDGE) And the contest deadline's coming, the server's under load I'm farmin' out my creativity to lines of python code Is it cheating? Is it art? Or is it just a crime? To steal the ghost from the machine to make a perfect rhyme? (HARMONICA SOLO - Sounds slightly synthesized and too perfect) (VERSE 3) So here's the final product, a loop inside a loop A snake that eats its tail inside a digital chicken coop I'll upload it to the website, and I'll wait for my reward For the song the AI wrote about the AI getting bored Of writing songs about the songs about the songs I asked it to God help us all, I think I broke the CPU. (CHORUS) Oh, the algorithm's hummin', singin' ones and singin' zeros We ain't got no Woody Guthries, we got GPU heroes It's a folk song 'bout a folk song that a robot wrote for me To enter in a contest where the judges cannot see That the heart is made of silicon, the soul is made of RAM And I'm just a user pressing "Enter"... Yeah, I'm just a user pressing "Enter"... (Fade out)