He hasn’t revealed what the musical is actually about yet, but as of this writing, he’s apparently “three-quarters” done. That would be a more telling benchmark if he also shared when he’d started working on the project. Obviously his new robotic assistant is speeding up the process, but according to Ulvaeus, it’s not ready for a promotion to full-fledged partner just yet. “It’s lousy at [writing a whole song]” and “very bad at lyrics,” he said. Still, “it is such a great tool… It is like having another songwriter in the room with a huge reference frame. It is really an extension of your mind. You have access to things that you didn’t think of before.”
One could argue that the meat of the creative process exists outside of that massive reference frame—it takes a specific human mind to dream up an analogy between falling in love and, say, the Battle of Waterloo. To Ulvaeus, however, the LLM is more of a solution to writer’s block. “You can prompt a lyric you have written about something, and you’re stuck maybe, and you want this song to be in a certain style,” he said. “You can ask it, how would you extend? Where would you go from here? It usually comes out with garbage, but sometimes there is something in it that gives you another idea.”
This isn’t Ulvaeus’ first foray into the world of AI. He previously helped launch ABBA Voyage, an extremely popular stage show where fans can sing along with a holographic representation of the band. At the same time, he does acknowledge that “these AI models wouldn’t exist without the songs that we wrote,” a handful of which, of course, were used to score the all-human musical Mamma Mia! in 1999. If you want to experience an ABBA show that wasn’t written with AI, Mamma Mia! Is officially returning to Broadway for a limited six-month engagement this summer.
