The world's inaugural AI-generated Christmas carol is a chilling creation, unlike anything you've heard before.

While many Christmas songs seem to fade into the background with their jingles and bells, blending seamlessly with one another, they’ve always been written by humans—until now.

Scientists at the University of Toronto have trained a recurrent neural network—an advanced form of AI—to compose a song inspired by a Christmas tree image. Listen for yourself to see if it sends a chill down your spine like a cold winter night.

In a paper currently under review, the researchers detail how they trained the AI to compose music by feeding it 100 hours of online tunes. They also provided thousands of images with captions, allowing the program to link words to visual patterns and create lyrics and music based on pictures.

"Instead of purchasing a karaoke machine with pre-loaded tracks, you can now create your own at home by adding photos and letting the machine generate music for you," said Sanja Fidler, one of the authors of the paper, in an interview with The Guardian. "The possibilities are endless," she added.

How does the song sound? It begins with a festive tone, though somewhat dull, but quickly veers into a more eerie direction. The AI seems to channel a spirit from Dickens, singing, "I've always been there for the rest of our lives," implying that the machine's consciousness has surpassed the linear concept of time that we mere mortals grasp. But true unease emerges when the cheerful tone fades, revealing something ominous lurking in the background.

Concerned that songwriting will fall victim to the wave of automation? Humans are still quite skilled at crafting delightfully awful novelty Christmas songs—after all, Elmo & Patsy were real people, not (as far as we know) creatures from the depths of hell, despite forcing "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" upon the public.

It's clear that artificial intelligence still has some way to go before it can truly match humans in composing the perfect song. Here's another attempt from the AI to create a narrative tune inspired by an image:

Still, if this is the worst the machines have planned for us, we’re in good shape. At least it’s not smooth jazz.