A.I. music

I just finished a very interesting book on A.I. by Mustafa Suleyman titled "The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilema. I highly recommend it if you are interested in this subject. I guarantee that it will sharpen your perspective on this issue.

AI isn’t really intelligent. It’s a data mining algorithm. It creates nothing on its own without referencing human work. It just accesses what is already created very well and can assemble it however it is asked to perform.

@falconquest I would submit that this is exacty what humans do. The phenonemon we call creativity is actually just a resythesis of elements that have come before. Music is an excellent example. There is nothing that is completely "original" in new music. Every new composition and performance references what has come before it. The concept of A.I. is modeled on how our brains work. It is only a matter of time before it A.I. exceeds the capabilities of the human brain and A.I. sentience is going to happen whether we like it or not.

@falconquest I stand by my opinion that there has never been anything truly original in music composition. Going back to the great classical composers, they often used folk melodies in their compositions and they built upon religious music that was performed in churches and monasteries. Yes, it got more complex, but it was not completely original.

I don't want to get too far into the weeds regarding music history but there has been a steady progression of composition for thousands of years, culture by culture, that has slowly and predictably built upon what came before. The music traditions of every culture are remarkably consistent with the musical development of that particular culture. For example, before there was cultural interchange, no East Indian person woke up one morning and wrote a classical composition in the style of Bach or a blues song in the style of Muddy Waters. Nothing like this has ever happened. But once people hear music from another culture they start to incorporate elements of that music into their own and they create something "new."

"Genius" has been defined as relating the normally unrelated. Jim Winey, the late designer of Magnapan speakes, had his revelation for speaker design while bonding two magnets together and he looked up at the perforated ceiling tile. Bingo! Flat Panel Speakers! What may seem like a completely novel idea always turns out to be a synthesis of other information.

In the book I referenced the author tells the story of teaching an A.I. to play the Chinese game of Go. It was strongly believed that no computer could ever defeat a human at the game. The computer not only beat the Chinese Go Master but it came up with a novel strategy that nobody had ever devised in the 2500 year history of the game. Now we are waiting to see if an A.I. robot can fold laundry.