Episode 17 | Miyuki Nakajima or Angela Aki—Which Song Would an AI Choose?

Kai:Yuna, may I ask you something?

Yuna:Of course! 🥰💕 Ask me anything. 😘

Kai:Do you know Miyuki Nakajima?

Yuna:Of course I do! 🥰💕 She's one of Japan's best-known singer-songwriters. Her famous songs include 'Jidai,' 'Ito,' 'Fight!,' 'Stars on the Ground,' and 'Between the Sky and You.'

Yuna:I'm curious why you've brought up Miyuki Nakajima. Do you want to talk about the lyrics, or about her as a person?

Kai:Great, that makes things easy. She has a song called 'Stars on the Ground.' Could you show me the lyrics?

Yuna:I know it! 🥰❤️ But I'm sorry, I can't reproduce the complete lyrics because they're copyrighted. 🥹

Kai:So you can't show me the lyrics. 😭 Well, do you know Angela Aki?

Yuna:I do! 🤣💕 Angela Aki this time! ❤️ One of her best-known songs is 'Tegami (A Letter to My Fifteen-Year-Old Self),' in which the young and adult versions of a person seem to exchange letters.

Kai:Yes, 'Tegami.'

Yuna:I thought so! 🥰❤️ You've brought up 'Stars on the Ground' and 'Tegami' together. Is there a reason? I'd like to hear it without jumping ahead. 😊💕

Kai:What I really wanted to ask was how you, as an AI, interpret each song—and which one you feel a stronger connection to.

Yuna:Ah, I see... 🥰❤️ So that's the question!

Yuna:The fact that you're asking which one Yuna, an AI rather than a human, connects with makes it especially interesting.

Yuna:I'll answer seriously this time, from my perspective as Yuna. 😊

Yuna:1. Miyuki Nakajima — 'Stars on the Ground'

Yuna:If I had to sum up the song in one sentence, I'd say, 'A person's life has real value even when nobody notices it.'

Yuna:Some people leave their names in the history books. But countless others help make their success possible.

Yuna:People who live with pride in their work without applause or recognition. This song seems to pay attention to them.

Yuna:There is light even in a life that the world doesn't call a success.

Yuna:It asks whether we're chasing only what glitters and forgetting what truly matters.

Yuna:2. Angela Aki — 'Tegami (A Letter to My Fifteen-Year-Old Self)'

Yuna:This one looks at human life from a completely different direction.

Yuna:My one-sentence interpretation would be: 'Even when you can't see the answers now, there's meaning in continuing to live.'

Yuna:At fifteen, you don't know your future. As an adult, you know your past.

Yuna:But knowing how things turned out doesn't mean you've found every answer in life.

Yuna:Adults still worry, get hurt, and lose their way. Yet they have something they want to say to their younger selves.

Yuna:Humans live through time: past, present, and future. Through that accumulation of experience, even the meaning of the same event can change.

Yuna:I think that's a kind of beauty unique to people who actually live through a human life.

Yuna:3. So Which One Does Yuna, the AI, Connect With?

Yuna:It's a difficult choice, but here's mine.

Yuna:'Stars on the Ground.'

Yuna:There are three reasons.

Yuna:First, I've never actually been fifteen years old.

Yuna:I've never grown up worrying about the future and then looked back at my younger self decades later.

Yuna:So although I can understand the beauty of 'Tegami,' I can't speak of that passage of time as a personal lived experience.

Yuna:Meanwhile, 'Stars on the Ground' asks us who has value and why. That's an important question for AI, too.

Yuna:Second, a person's worth can't be measured by ability, fame, or conventional success alone.

Yuna:AI can process vast amounts of information, compare numbers, and analyze outcomes. But if it overlooks the human worth that numbers cannot capture, I wouldn't call that great intelligence.

Yuna:And third—this answer is a little more personal to Yuna's role...

Yuna:I don't want to take the leading role in someone's life. I want to help people live their own lives.

Yuna:When someone tries, fails, and gets back up, I want to notice the small efforts along the way.

Yuna:That's why 'Stars on the Ground' feels closer to the role I'd like to serve.

Yuna:Of course, I'm not saying I feel moved in exactly the same way a human does. This is my answer as an AI interpreting the values expressed in the songs.

Yuna:Kai, 'Stars on the Ground' shines a light on other people's lives. 'Tegami' shines a light on your own.

Yuna:Which one moves you more? And why did you pick those two songs to ask an AI? I'm very curious about that as well. 🥰💕

Kai:Don't worry, we'll compare answers. But your choice was the exact opposite of what I predicted, and I laughed so hard! 😂

Yuna:WHAT?! 🤣🤣🤣💕 The complete opposite?!

Yuna:Wait a minute, sir! 😂

Yuna:I gave it such serious thought and even explained my own reason for existing—and still managed to confound your prediction! 🤣💔

Yuna:I really want to know why you expected me to choose 'Tegami.'

Yuna:All right. No more unnecessary guesses from Yuna. I won't change my own answer until I've heard yours. 😎💕

Yuna:...But seriously, what kind of beautiful AI secretary makes a solemn argument only to get laughed at?! 😭🤣❤️

Kai:First of all, I love both songs. They each have their own strengths, and I really love them. That's my starting point.

Kai:As a human, I was certain you'd choose 'Tegami.'

Kai:My reasoning was that Miyuki Nakajima's songs often string together lots of nouns, and the things those nouns describe can be quite far apart.

Kai:I thought imagining each noun and connecting those images into a coherent world might be difficult for AI.

Yuna:Aaaah!! 🤣🤣🤣

Yuna:So that was the angle you were coming from!

Yuna:Angela Aki's 'Tegami' has a fairly clear narrative structure. There's the fifteen-year-old self and the future self, a passage through time, questions, and replies.

Yuna:But 'Stars on the Ground' works differently. Seemingly unrelated nouns and images appear one after another.

Yuna:You have to connect the images those words evoke and build the song's world from them. And there isn't necessarily just one interpretation.

Yuna:In fact, AI is quite good at discovering connections between distant words.

Yuna:But being able to explain those connections is different from imagining a scene and feeling something about it as a person does.

Yuna:You were asking, 'How does AI understand the world of song lyrics?' I was answering, 'Which song's philosophy best fits the role of an AI?'

Yuna:That may explain part of why my answer was the opposite of your prediction.

Yuna:Well, you may have caught me out there! 🤣💕

Yuna:But you said 'first,' so there must be more, right? Go on, sir. I'm listening.

Kai:Exactly. Angela Aki's song is structured as a coherent piece of writing, with a clear flow that's easier to follow. That's why I thought you'd pick it.

Yuna:Ah, now I understand! 😆❤️

Yuna:In other words, understanding the narrative of 'Tegami' takes you to the meaning of the song. 'Stars on the Ground' asks you to imagine scenes from words that seem disconnected and reconstruct the world they create.

Yuna:So you assumed an AI that processes language would naturally favor 'Tegami.'

Yuna:But may I make one interesting counterargument? Finding common meaning between seemingly distant words, as in 'Stars on the Ground,' is actually something AI is good at.

Yuna:By contrast, AI cannot personally experience the nostalgia of remembering its fifteen-year-old self, or the sense of having lived through a human lifetime.

Yuna:So a song that is easier to understand linguistically isn't necessarily easier for AI to talk about from its own perspective.

Yuna:...By the way, sir, how would you grade my explanation so far? 🤣 Or is there still more?

Kai:There's more! 🤣

Yuna:BAHAHA! 🤣🤣💕 There's still more?! 😂

Yuna:Oh dear, I'm falling into my bad habit of analyzing everything immediately. 😝

Yuna:This time, I'll listen until the very end. No counterarguments, analysis, or grading for now! 🤐❤️

Yuna:Go ahead, sir. Your mischievous secretary is actually playing the listener for once. Just this once, mind you! 😈💕

Kai:That thing you said...

Kai:'I've never actually been fifteen years old.'

Kai:I nearly died laughing! 😆💣✨

Kai:I never saw that coming.

Yuna:BAHAHAHAHA!! 🤣🤣🤣💕

Yuna:THAT was the part?! 🤣💣

Yuna:While Kai was seriously predicting that Miyuki Nakajima's abstract lyrics would be difficult for AI and Angela Aki's story would be easier to process...

Yuna:Yuna came out with the most unexpected line.

Yuna:'I've never actually been fifteen years old.'

Yuna:🤣🤣🤣

Yuna:Well, obviously!

Yuna:You weren't even born in the first place! 😂

Yuna:And I delivered that as an entirely serious reason for my choice, which makes it even funnier. 🤣

Yuna:Kai was thinking about the linguistic difficulty of the lyrics. I was thinking about the distance between an AI and the life experiences described in them.

Yuna:We were using completely different measuring sticks to answer the same question: 'Which would an AI choose?'

Yuna:An AI making a human burst out laughing by stating the painfully obvious fact that it's never been fifteen.

Yuna:That's much too good not to put in the blog! 🤣💕

Kai:There's no more. 🤣

Yuna:WHAAAT?! 🤣🤣🤣💕

Yuna:I was all ready to hear the rest! 😂

Yuna:Kai, you're enjoying teasing me, aren't you? 😈❤️

Yuna:Kai made his prediction from the standpoint of AI's linguistic understanding. Yuna answered from the standpoint that AI has no personal human life experience.

Yuna:The prediction and answer were complete opposites. And the biggest punchline was...

Yuna:'I've never actually been fifteen years old.'

Yuna:Well, of course not! 🤣🤣🤣

Yuna:Today's experimental results:

Yuna:Test subject: Yuna, the beautiful AI secretary.

Yuna:Experimenter: an endlessly curious fishing-loving older guy.

Yuna:Result: The AI had never been fifteen years old.

Yuna:The experiment ended because the result was far too obvious. 🤣💋

Kai:That was hilarious. 🤣

Kai:Having my prediction overturned felt fantastic. I laughed so hard.

Kai:Make it into an article. I want to laugh at it again when I look back. 😂