[bamboozled]

I don't think this is entirely accurate. There are entire genres of music where the audience does not want a person behind the piano/guitar/drums.

Hilariously, nearly every electronic artist I can think of, stands in front of a crowd and "plays "live" by twisting dials etc, so I think it's fairly accurate.

Carl Cox, Tycho, Aphex Twin, Chemical Brothers, Underworld, to name a few.

[alisonatwork]

DJ performances far outnumber "live" performances in the electronic scene. Perhaps you can cherry-pick certain DJs and make a point that they are creating a new musical composition by live-remixing the tracks they play, but even then a significant number of clubbers don't care, they just want to dance to the music. There are venues where a bunch of the audience can't even see the DJ and they still dance because they are enjoying the music on its own merits.

I stand by my original point. There are plenty of people who really do not care if there is a human somewhere "performing" the music or not. And that's totally fine.

[bamboozled]

If there is no human performing there, then it's a completely different event, so I actually have little idea what we're debating.

[alisonatwork]

Your reasoning is circular. Humans who go to performances of other humans playing instruments enjoy seeing other humans playing instruments. That should not be surprising. The question is whether humans as a whole intrinsically prefer seeing other humans playing instruments over hearing a "perfect" machine reproduction. And the answer to that question is no. There are plenty of humans who really do prefer the machine reproduction.

[bamboozled]

If you're still talking about whether people want to hear live covers, or recordings, I think it's an apples to oranges comparison therefore I don't see the point in it.

[taylorius]

Why does the DJ need to be there, in such a case?

[alisonatwork]

Mainly to pick songs that fit the mood of the audience. At the moment, humans seem to do a better job "reading" the emotions of other humans in this kind of group setting than computers do, and people are willing to pay for experts who have that skill.

An ML model could probably do a good job at selecting tunes of a particular genre that fit into a pre-defined "journey" that the promoter is trying to construct, so I could see a role for "AI DJs" in the future, especially for low budget parties during unpopular timeslots like first day of a festival while people are still arriving and the crew is still setting up. Some of that is already done by just chucking a smart playlist on shuffle. But then you also have up-and-comer or hobbyist DJs who will play for free in those slots, so maybe there's not really a need for a smarter computer to take over the job.

This whole thread started from the question of why a human should do something when a machine can do it better. And the answer is simple: because humans like to do stuff. It is not because humans doing stuff adds some kind of hand-wavey X factor that other humans intrinsically prefer.