An Australian team won a competition to write a Eurovision hit song using artificial intelligence.
Dutch publisher VPRO came up with the idea after the Netherlands won last year's Eurovision Song Contest.
And it turned into an international effort after this year's competition was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The winning song, Beautiful the World, was inspired by the recovery of nature from the fires earlier this year.
13 teams from the Netherlands, Australia, Sweden, Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Switzerland took part.
The Australian team, called Uncanny Valley in a nod to how humans and robots could merge one day, consisted of students of math, computer science and social anthropology, as well as music producers.
The melody and lyrics were written by an artificial intelligence system, trained with audio samples of koalas, kookaburras and Tasmanian devils.
'Douze points'
The audience voted overwhelmingly for the song.
A group of artificial intelligence experts, Vincent Koops, Anna Huang and Ed Newton-Rex, also rated him very well, but gave the German team Dadabots full "douze points".
The panel was "amazed by the wide range of innovative approaches to using AI to create music".
"Composing a song with artificial intelligence is difficult because you have all the creative challenges that come from writing a song, but you also have to juggle to get the right machine learning," they said.
"The teams have not only pushed the boundaries of their personal creativity, but have also given the public a glimpse into the exciting future of human-AI musical collaboration."
VPRO senior editor Karen van Dijk, who came up with the idea for the contest, said that all teams made the most of the creative possibilities of artificial intelligence.
"In my opinion, some songs would not be out of place in the official Eurovision Song Contest."
Team details are available on the VPRO website and a live streaming of the competition is available on YouTube.
