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by BowBun 2616 days ago
Fear not, my friend, because the execution is only a part of why music and art as a whole carries meaning for us.

Consider two tracks that are identical (forget copywrite for a minute). Between one that an AI generated and a human composed, I would personally grant the human-generated version more credit and enjoy it more. The story of how art is created and the stories of the artist are as substantial to appreciating art as a stroke of a brush or a note on a page. Computers will never replicate this until singularity.

4 comments

First of all, I disagree with this premise, as the overwhelming majority of music either (1) doesn't have a particular story behind it at all or (2) becomes popular, and then people learn the story behind it.

Even accepting the premise, what happens when the next artist with a great story is simply using MuseNet to write their emotional pieces and passing it off as human? They'll be functionally the same, yet it still feels like something was lost.

What makes you think that a computer that can generate music cannot also generate a background for the "creator" of that music? It can give you all the stories that touch our hearts even more so than we can imagine.
Why generate a fake story? Why not communicate the real and moving journey of how a single note in the training data travelled through hundreds of neurons and thousands of matrices, and eventually made it past the final activation function to become a feature in the output tensor.
That must be a touching story, I’m sure.
Because the background is not "real."

Given two stories, both identical, where one story is real - the real story will always be more meaningful because it has actually happened within the constraints of our reality, granting it validity and us the ability to relate to it.

Now, consider two stories, both identical, where one story is "real" and the other story is from a simulated universe. Now I'd say that both stories are of possibly equivalent value, since both have happened.

Even especially when OpenAI has such a wonderfull 'fake' text generator/narator ...

I wonder, if they can compose, how long until passable lyrics are added along?

I kinda thank you for your comment, it gives me more...hope? :) (I'm an artist) The same way when we see other human did something extraordinary that we think human can't do(based mostly on ourselves) For example, an artist who can draw something so life-like or sculptor who shape hard marble into soft, flowing clothes — with just hammer and chisel.

Human potential always intrigues us "What? Human can do THAT?" kind of way.

Yes, the machine and AI can do the same thing at the fraction of time, from the practicality standpoint, but it's not and never be the same — it's empty. It's just lifeless product and we never feel related to it.

I think that when placed against each other in this hypothetical, yes one would naturally side with a human (even if it is just out of solidarity), but what about when humans (who already claim the fame from songs written by other humans) claim the fame for song written by computers--that have no legal recourse? Would we just assume the music claimed by a human, was originated by a human?