If A.I. took the place of musicians, would you listen to it?


A few questions which I'm curious about. If you have a take on this, please share!

Here's the question:

A.I. is increasingly playing a role in music creation. Not just assisting composers, but generating music.

If you found an A.I. generated song to be enjoyable, interesting, etc. would you have any objection to supporting it by listening and paying for the service which provides it?

If more and more music was like this, and there were fewer and fewer jobs for musicians, would that bother you? -- I'm thinking here about the aesthetics of the issue, not the economics or justice of it. 

I'm trying to understand if people just want to have a certain set of sensations from music and they don't care if there are human beings creating it -- or if it's important for you to know that what you're experiencing from music (or art) is coming from human beings.

Thank you for thinking about this.

hilde45

Showing 2 responses by jakleiss

The British mathematician Alan Turing posed a test (the Turing Test) to determine whether a computer was as smart as a human. It was simply that if you interact with a computer and you can't tell if it is a computer or a human being responding then the computer was is as smart as a human. In the case of music, it you can't tell the difference between artificially generated music and human generated music then the artificially generated music is as good as that created by a human.

A more general question is whether humans can, in fact, do anything that a computer cannot do. The mathematician Kurt Godel "proved" that math is incomplete, i.e., that there are some mathematical truths the cannot be deduced mathematically. These truths are based on self reference, i.e., statements that talk about themselves. I won't be so arrogant as to attempt to explain that, but there is an interesting book by Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, which goes into it in exquisite detail. The book is: The Emperor's New Mind. In this light, it is interesting to note that Bach's music is recursive in a kind of self-referential way. It repeats itself in different ways at different points in time. Maybe that's an example of music AI can't come up with.

Cooper52, your comment about the "uncanny valley effect" is, I think, much to my point. AI music will sound like music, but something might reveal itself to be "not quite right."

Thanks for your comment.